A hardworking University of Southhampton archaeologist was rewarded with the peak experience of an entire career this summer, as his trowel and whisk brushed aside a layer of thin gravel and saw a two thousand year old face taking shape below him.
Spooky. Hitting a buried classical statue face first has got to be the rariety of a lifetime.
Unless ground penetrating radar has got better than I knew, I suppose. Sigh.
Very nice.
I realize the centuries involved, but it’s still hard for me to grasp how this stuff gets so totally buried and obliterated over time.
You’d think subsequent generations would want to keep these places functioning.
Many of the best artifact finds in Jamestowne, VA have come from the latrines and wells, everything from pottery, guns, halbards, shoes, religious items, animal bones, etc. Easy to bury stuff when it is just being used for backfill.
sometimes the statues get burried…
i believe some of the statues of the prussian monarchy in berlin were burried outside the city to keep them safe from termoil of revolution… maby the same thing happened with this fellow.
Statuary was significantly more common during the Roman period than any time since, they came and they went with changes in society, many were just trashed, it kept the craftsmen employed.
There are those folk who bury a statue of St. Joseph in the back yard to help sell their house. Maybe some Romans were trying to do a quick flip on a temple they’d rehabbed. 
How interesting and heartening to know that things like this happen in real life. Face is kinda spooky for the season.
Although nothing on this scale, I had one of those serendipitous moments a few years ago involving finding stuff. I was visiting a friend who had bought a ranch up in Lake County, in an area heavily settled by Indians in past days. The friend, a polymath, had at one time been an archaeologist who specialized in helping to unearth Indian bones and artifacts when they were discovered at construction sites.
At any rate, we were standing by a small fire of leaves (it was autumn) he had gathered up. We had just finished talking about one of his Indian digs. I absentmindedly reached down and grabbed an oval rock. It had a perfectly round hole in it, either for shaping arrows or perhaps for creating friction to start a fire, no doubt an artifact. I handed it to him and we both looked at each other. It was what I call a “crynoutloud” moment. It ended up on his mantle with his arrowheads and other stuff he had collected over the years..
And so it happens that future generations of the squirrel clan lament the untimely loss of their nut-grinder . . .
