Pulled a Roman nail out of the ground and it crumbled in my hand

I was on a dig near Chester last summer and thought I found a perfect iron nail from the Roman fort. The second I tried to brush the dirt off, half of it turned to orange powder. Got scolded by the site supervisor for not using a stabilizer spray first.

3 comments

3 Comments

mia74823d ago

That's a shame about the nail, but your supervisor had a point. Things that have been in the ground for centuries are fragile once they're exposed to air. It's a tough lesson, but at least you learned it on a small artifact rather than something really important.

graceblack22h ago

Oh, you've had this happen too? I still remember the summer I was helping clean up a small dig site and I had this tiny pottery shard in my hand. It was nothing fancy, basically just a piece of a broken bowl. But it was still damp from the ground and I set it down on a dry rock for like two seconds. By the time I looked back, it had cracked right down the middle from drying out too fast. My supervisor just sighed and said "well, now you know." Felt like such an idiot. But yeah, you're right. Better a stupid little shard than a whole pot or something. That nail story still makes me wince though.

ray36323d ago

Whoa, hold on. I gotta push back a little here. Yeah, the nail is small, but it's still a piece of history that's gone now. Every artifact tells part of a bigger story, and losing any piece feels like a shame to me. I get the "learn from small mistakes" angle, but it still stings. You can't just brush it off because it wasn't a sword or a coin. That's like saying it's okay to drop a dollar because you didn't drop a hundred.