Pulled a Roman nail out of the ground and it crumbled in my hand

I was on a dig near Chester last summer and thought I found a perfect iron nail from the Roman fort. The second I tried to brush the dirt off, half of it turned to orange powder. Got scolded by the site supervisor for not using a stabilizer spray first.

2 comments

2 Comments

mia74819d ago

That's a shame about the nail, but your supervisor had a point. Things that have been in the ground for centuries are fragile once they're exposed to air. It's a tough lesson, but at least you learned it on a small artifact rather than something really important.

ray36319d ago

Whoa, hold on. I gotta push back a little here. Yeah, the nail is small, but it's still a piece of history that's gone now. Every artifact tells part of a bigger story, and losing any piece feels like a shame to me. I get the "learn from small mistakes" angle, but it still stings. You can't just brush it off because it wasn't a sword or a coin. That's like saying it's okay to drop a dollar because you didn't drop a hundred.