Last Tuesday at Sutton Hoo I found a Roman coin in a bag of rubble

I was volunteering with the excavation team near the main mound, sifting through spoil heaps. One of the supervisors tossed me a bag of dirt marked as discard, and I pulled out a silver denarius from 117 AD. Has anyone else ever found something big in material everyone else wrote off?

3 comments

3 Comments

williamw7518d ago

You said it came from a bag marked discard. That reminds me of a time I was regrouting someone's bathroom floor and the homeowner told me to toss the old chunks of broken tile. I threw them in a bucket and later that night my kid asked if he could have one for a school project. Turned out one of those pieces was part of a decorative terra cotta vent from the 1920s. The homeowner was mad I didn't save it for them. Sometimes the stuff everyone else calls trash is the real find.

grantw4118d ago

Pulled a similar thing myself last year. My neighbor was cleaning out their garage and had a pile of old license plates they were going to take to the dump. Told me to grab whatever I wanted. They were all from the 1960s and 70s, pretty beat up. I took a bunch home and my son hung them in his room. Turns out one was a rare 1969 plate from a small county that only made a few thousand of them. My neighbor saw it on Facebook later and said they could have sold it for like 200 bucks. I felt bad but hey, it was in the trash pile. @williamw75 is right, one person's junk is another person's treasure.

charles7206d ago

Wait, he saw it on Facebook and then told you it was worth money?