My team just cataloged our 10,000th artifact from the coastal dig

Val Sullivan · 2026-03-19T19:35:06.910743+00:00

We've been working on this site for three years now, and hitting that number really made me stop. It means we've found over three times what the initial survey predicted. Most of them are pottery shards and fish bones, but the sheer volume tells a story about how many people lived there. Has anyone else had a dig where the artifact count totally changed your view of a site?

the_taylor6mo ago

Wait, but doesn't more stuff mean more people were there making and using it? That seems like a big deal to me.

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the_hugo6mo ago

But isn't quantity just... stuff? Doesn't always mean it was a big deal.

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lucas635mo ago

Wow, that's a huge find! I read a paper once where a simple trash pit's crazy artifact count totally rewrote the population estimates for a whole settlement. @the_taylor is onto something, more stuff really does paint a different picture.

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