That afternoon at the Field Museum when a curator let me hold a 2,000 year old pot

Pat Martinez · 2026-10-22T04:15:03.938421+00:00

Back in 2011 I was at the Field Museum in Chicago for a members event and a curator passed around a Roman oil lamp so we could feel the maker's fingerprints still pressed in the clay. Up until then archaeology was just pictures in books to me, but feeling those marks made the people feel real and I started actually reading the site reports instead of just skimming the photos. Has anyone else had a museum moment where touching or seeing something up close totally shifted how you look at a period?

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That afternoon at the Field Museum when a curator let me hold a 2,000 year old pot | Archaeology Discoveries - SMM Buzz