My grad school dig in Turkey three years ago turned up a truly ancient snack

We were working a site near Antalya, carefully brushing away dirt from what looked like a storage jar. Last week, I was cleaning finds in the lab and found a single, perfectly preserved chickpea inside it. My professor just stared at it and said, 'That's a 3,000-year-old legume. Do not eat it.' I had to label it and everything. Has anyone else ever cataloged something that was basically just old food?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_adam2mo ago

My archaeology professor at UCLA always said we'd find boring stuff. Then I spent a whole day logging 500-year-old olive pits from a Spanish shipwreck.

blairtaylor2mo ago

Honestly though, is logging that stuff even important? Like they're just old olive pits. I get it's history but come on, a whole day for that? Seems like busywork to me. Maybe the professor had a point about finding boring things.

williams.kim2mo ago

That kinda reminds me of how people today lose their minds over a 'vintage' candy wrapper from the 90s or an unopened can of soda from a decade ago. It's like we're all wired to assign value to old preserved stuff, whether it's a 3000-year-old chickpea or a sealed Beanie Baby. The difference is one actually tells us something about how people lived, the other just sits on a shelf collecting dust. Your professor probably just got tired of watching undergrads try to sneak ancient artifacts home as souvenirs.