My field school mishap with a Roman tile kiln near Bath

Last summer I was on a dig just outside Bath and we found what we thought was a pottery kiln, so I got assigned to clear the stokehole. Three days of careful scraping later, it turned out to be a Roman tile kiln, not pottery, and I had been bagging all the wasters as if they were junk. The supervisor laughed and said 'everyone makes that call once,' but we ended up with over 200 tile fragments that changed the site's date by a century. Anyone else ever misjudge a feature and end up with a whole new research question on their hands?

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hannahcraig20d ago

Tbh my first solo feature was a "hearth" that turned out to be a burnt tree root, so at least your 200 tiles actually meant something. Misjudging stuff is basically the whole job.

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