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8. Small Finds
- University of Arizona Press
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169 chapter eight Small Finds * * * “¡Ellie! ¿Una bolsa especial?” I looked up. Ramón was jogging across the field holding something in his closed hand. As he approached me, he asked again for “a special bag” and opened his hand to show me what he’d found. I took the little earring and pretended to weigh the merit of using one of my small bags for the item. Ramón’s eyes glinted hopefully while he tried to look too cool to care for the benefit of his digging buddy Jaime. My habit of putting notable artifacts, or small finds, into their own bags (so the artifacts wouldn’t get lost) had turned into something of a competition between the two young men. Whenever either of them found something that was the slightest bit out of the ordinary, he would come running to ask if it deserved its own bag. Every time I answered his query with a nod, the finder would puff up and hold the find over his friend’s head until the other was able to “catch up.” Putting aside the paperwork I had been filling out, I nodded, “Sí, una bolsa especial.” He grinned as I reached into my toolbox for one of the little bags. I double-checked the provenience designation for Ramón’s excavation unit on my log sheet and began filling the pertinent information out on the bag with my permanent marker—provenience designation, date, my initials, the bag number, and a brief description of the contents. I added the bag number to my bag log and the little bag before handing it back to Ramón, telling him to keep it with the other artifacts. He went off, 170 • Chapter Eight proud but cool, to show Jaime what he’d found. I flipped through my notebook to the paperwork for the unit where Ramón was working and added a note about the earring he’d just discovered. As I mechanically completed my paperwork, I thought about the woman who had lost the little gold earring 150 years earlier and found myself smiling in sympathy. I knew that particular frustration well. My jewelry box is full of unmatched bits of jewelry, each lone earring offering testament to my optimistic personality. I know the other isn’t turning up, but discarding its match would mean admitting failure. As I stood in the hot sun updating my paperwork and keeping an eye on the competitive antics of Jaime and Ramón, I found it easy to imagine that the particular emotional experience of loss, regret, and frustration linked to the little gold earring I weighed in my hand crossed the boundaries of time and culture. * * * When someone discovers that I am an archaeologist, the question pops out in short order. “What is the most interesting thing you’ve ever found?” they ask, eyes alight with excitement, visions of King Tut’s tomb dancing in their heads. Like most archaeologists, it is the question I hear most often . I don’t want to disappoint the person looking at me so eagerly—over the second course or the grocery cart—but, truthfully, the most interesting discoveries are often the most mundane. The small finds that I carefully tucked away, to the delight or dismay of Ramón and Jaime, in my “bolsas especiales” were rarely earth-shattering discoveries worthy of a magazine spread, but they almost always gave me a bit of a thrill. And so, when asked the dreaded question, I answer, “My favorite finds are the little things that connect me to the experiences of the people I’m studying.” And then I explain, trying to entice and entertain my listener with descriptions of life’s detritus. Archaeological finds do not have to be worthy of a blockbuster museum exhibit to be magical. There is a tendency to think about the artifacts we find in functional terms. We delicately hold an item in the field or lab and think, “What was this for?” We look at the pictures of artifacts in books, magazines, or the newspaper and wonder, “What did they do with that?” But our lives are filled with functional objects that are also imbued with meaning. The mug sitting on my desk serves the purpose of holding my coffee, but it also reminds me of the vacation I bought it on. As I take a sip of my coffee, I reminisce about that long-ago trip to Florida’s Everglades with...