What are the chances?

December 18, 2024 8:35 AM

A detectorist found an early medieval imitation of a Roman coin in Norfolk. A group of volunteer archaeologists found a mammoth tusk on a beach in Essex. A 12-year-old girl found a 3,500-year-old Egyptian amulet while hiking near Tel Aviv. A 6-year-old boy found a Neanderthal hand axe on a Sussex beach.

Do the right thing (whatever that is in your area) if you're lucky enough to make a chance find.

posted by rory (11 comments total)

These are so cool! I'm a dedicated beachcomber and have always wanted to find something significant - instead I have a lot of photos of kelp and one hell of a collection of crab pot buoys. It's so great to read about people who do find things, particularly children. Every child's dream! It's interesting that the mammoth tusk is being left where it was found; apparently it would disintegrate if removed. It is so eerie to think about what's buried under our feet; we walk on the past every day.
posted by mygothlaundry at 10:35 AM on December 18 [3 favorites]

One of my favorite chance find stories was the Nonconnah Creek Mastodon, found near Memphis by a couple of boys, one of whom had an older brother who was an archaeology student.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:00 AM on December 18 [2 favorites]

I love it!

I went on a dig in Israel once. A guy found a Neolithic flint knife just by going for a call of nature behind the right bush. We weren’t even working on the Neolithic period.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:04 AM on December 18 [5 favorites]

Clearly, the younger the searcher, the older the find. Newborns should be part of every archeological dig!
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:02 PM on December 18 [2 favorites]

re: Countess Elena - I think Ed Conway's Material World had a bit about how some important mineral find came about because one of the geologists had to take a pit stop and just happened to notice some landscape feature that warranted further investigation. And how that was a running joke amongst geologists that they should always include in their group someone with a small bladder; perhaps we should include archaeologists in that
posted by edward_5000 at 3:09 PM on December 18 [1 favorite]

I went on a Baylor University fossil hunt when I was in grade school. It was to an area known for its fossils. Texas used to be on the bottom of an ocean so marine fossils are plentiful. I walked around for a while, flipped over a limestone rock and there was an Ammonite-like impression as big as a salad plate. Almost immediately college students were offering me cash for it. I refused since it was the first thing I had ever found...
posted by jim in austin at 3:13 PM on December 18 [5 favorites]

I love these kinds of stories! As a former archaeologist, I still spend most of my time when walking somewhere staring down at the ground looking for stuff. Comes in handy when fossil hunting too! Never found anything super old or special or important. Weird, though? Absolutely! My favorite has to be the parking lot dentures!

I have found stuff when not looking for it too. I was driving along the road in Death Valley, NV and stopped randomly to take a photo. Complete desert emptiness on all sides. As I walked off to the side of my rental car, I looked down and spotted half a black flint biface (a stone tool) sitting perched on the surface of the sand all warm from the sun. That was a good one.
posted by gemmy at 4:46 PM on December 18 [6 favorites]

The Neanderthal hand axe was the most stunning for me—what a sharp-eyed and lucky kid. Almost makes me wish I lived near a beach in southern England rather than ones that were being scraped clean by a mile of ice twenty-five thousand years ago, sweeping away any hand axes and mammoth tusks in the vicinity.
posted by rory at 4:03 AM on December 19

In the Stop & Shop parking lot last Sunday, I fund an new, unopened box of kitchen trash bags left in a shopping cart.

But does anyone interview me? Are there news cameras and flash bulbs in my face? What do you think?
posted by wenestvedt at 6:35 AM on December 19 [2 favorites]

Were they Neanderthal trash bags?
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:14 AM on December 19

They were plastic, so I guess they were more likely to be made of Neanderthals than to have been made by Neanderthals.
posted by wenestvedt at 10:16 AM on December 19 [1 favorite]