Little Reminders Make Me Pause and Think

This story does not only belong to me. As an archaeologist, I work to uncover and tell the stories of those who came before us and lay hidden, buried, lost, forgotten.

 

I work in Ontario and survey and excavate First Nations and European settler sites. Most are fairly routine and have numerous fragments of broken objects, however, every now and then we find something that ties us to the past and reminds us that people just like you and I were here long ago.

 

On a work day like any other, I was with a couple coworkers and we were simply working away, digging and screening. We were on a First Nation’s site finding fragments of pottery and stone. I had been screening soil when a little piece of pottery caught my eye. Gently, I turned it over in my fingers trying to clean it. When I took a closer look I saw there were designs on one side and, flipping it over, I discovered a fingerprint preserved in the clay on the other.

 

A piece of the person who made this pot almost 800 years ago was preserved, reminding me that there were people just like you and I on this space centuries ago.

 

Who were they? How old were they? Did they like making clay pots? Were they proud of their work? Did they have children? Were they happy?

 

It is always exciting and grounding finding those little hints and reminders of the people that we often leave out or forget about, that came before us.

 

We focus on our lives and our work so much that we don’t stop and think about others often. We read about people from our past, how different their lives were and what big events shaped our history as a species and cultures. But what else do we know?

 

These little reminders always make me pause and think. What will be left of us when we’re gone? How will we impact and leave the world? In a world of online lives, will our physical footprints be studied and not our digital footprint? Or will we forget the physical objects we leave behind? Will “digital archaeology” take hold and we’ll forget about how we shaped the physical world around us and our interactions with those we can touch? There’s a lot to wonder and think about from our past, now, and into our future.

 

There’s something extremely personal about being able to hold an object, a physical piece of history, something that binds us, connects us to those people we read about that shaped our world.

 

As I said, I’m an archaeologist and while I often think about how our lives will be seen in the future, I’m always drawn to our past – who was here before us, how they lived, loved and survived, maybe not exactly the same as we do, but just as deeply – and there’s the big question of, what can we learn from them?

 

The next time you discover a found object, pause for a moment and take it in. Is there a story or idea you could learn from it?

 

All our thoughts, emotions, interactions, loves and lives, glimpsed through a clay fingerprint.