Thread by @ArchaeologyGame

🧵 1/ Come along on a journey of how archaeology REALLY works..

So, recall this quite strange artifact I showed off a few days ago? It was found near the bottom of a historic fill layer at the Henry Whitfield House in Guilford, Connecticut.

2/ Here it is moments after recovery last July. This was one of the most interesting artifacts I had ever seen. Also, I had No Idea what this thing was, but I found it so evocative. Look at that weird little face on there! Look at that delicate handle!

3/ So, the guessing games began. Here's a video of it in motion - that's right, it moves! That little iron bit near the "arm" is a tiny delicate hinge. And I mean delicate, we don't move it anymore bc it's very corroded.

youtube.com/shorts/GKp7s0B…

4/ My initial guesses were.. well.. very wrong. I was convinced this was an 18th century child's toy, sort of in the whirligig category. But initial attempts to find info about it were unsuccessful. I was fascinated!

5/ Finally, I went to twitter, where the inimitable @archae_delle immediately identified it as a fragment of 16th/17th century chafing dish. I'd never heard of such a thing. There exist numerous similar examples in the UK's Portable Antiquities Scheme.

6/ Dr. Bricking wowed me again today by being able to provide, on command, the somewhat obscure 1973 hyper-focused article on exactly these types of artifacts and how to identify them. What a title!

7/ So, for a year I've known that this was a chafing dish fragment, and I knew that it is probably the oldest settler-colonial artifact ever found at the site (1575-1650, the house was built in 1639). But I had no idea what part of the vessel these things belonged to. Well!

8/ So far as I know, this is the first of this type of artifact to be found in North America. If anyone knows of others, please let me know!

Because that, it turns out, is how archaeology works in 2023. Twitter, cell phone photos, and YouTube shorts. And one OLD artifact.

#Archaeology @findsorguk @SCSU @SHA_org @SAAorg @CNEHA_org

@BostonArchaeo @Montpelier_Arch @cfeagans @fiftysitesbook @KathrynSampeck @register_of @CurtCarbonell @fubarchaeo @lauraheathstout @cocalola @MTB_Archaeology @PattMeeples @plbhalbert @trowel_by_fire @xdirtyfingers @brockter @jonmarcoux any of you ever seen one of these??

@BostonArchaeo @Montpelier_Arch @cfeagans @fiftysitesbook @KathrynSampeck @register_of @CurtCarbonell @fubarchaeo @lauraheathstout @cocalola @MTB_Archaeology @PattMeeples @plbhalbert @trowel_by_fire @xdirtyfingers @brockter @jonmarcoux A whole bunch of historical archaeologists I didn't tag here, so if you're the sort of person who has maybe seen one of these on a site not in the UK, give me a holler. Frankly... if you've seen them on a UK site let me know, so far I've only seen them in the PAS