People have often asked me what was the most exciting object I ever found while working in archaeology. Two finds stand out in my memory and I can’t decide between them, so I will describe both. They could not have been more different. One dated from the Ice Age, the other was medieval. One I uncovered on an excavation, the other in a museum.

The excavation was in south-west France. We were working in the cool shade under the overhang of a limestone cliff. Above us towered the cliff, below us stretched a gentle wooded slope. Saplings had grown across the entrance to the shelter and filtered the sunlight. Fourteen thousand years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, people had lived there, blocking the entrance with a wall and lighting a fire year after year on the same spot to make a snug home for the winter. Now some of us were uncovering the hearth, slowly peeling off the layers of earth and ash, while others were working on the area just outside the living space, where they had thrown their rubbish. Strings weighted with fishing line sinkers hung from a frame across the ceiling, marking the ground below into one metre squares so that we could make records of the horizontal distribution of the finds.  A string triangle at the edge of the working area allowed us to record the depth above sea level of finds and surfaces.

I was working on the rubbish dump. As I gently scraped the earth away, I found two tiny flakes of fine bright yellow stone, each with minute chips removed from the edges to shape it. They were the stone barb and tip of an arrowhead made of yellow jasper. The wood of the arrow had decayed, leaving them lying in the exact position they had been in when they were still attached to it, one lying flat, one on its side.  They were quite beautiful, the fine yellow stone looking like solidified butter. And mine were the first eyes that had seen them, mine the first hand that had touched them, in fourteen thousand years.

But you don’t have to be working on site to make an exciting discovery. Almost equally thrilling was a find I made when I was doing post-excavation work on the pottery from a medieval town. All the potsherds had been washed clean and marked with the code for the site and the layer it had come from. This was done in a shed on site while the excavation was going on. Then it was my job to lay all the pottery out on a huge table and see if any of the broken bits would stick together, before proceeding with the cataloguing. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle, but with half the pieces missing, because for various reasons, we never found all the bits.

One of the medieval pits had produced a number of very large sherds of coarse grey unglazed pottery made locally in the thirteenth century. I fitted them together to produce the best part of two dripping dishes. Dripping dishes were shallow pans that were placed under the roasting spit in front of the fire to catch the fat and juices that dripped out of the meat. Mine were semi-circular in shape, with a straight edge on the side nearest the fire, and a handle on the round edge away from it. Each corner had a lip for pouring off the fat. And the best thing of all was that these two dripping dishes had actual medieval fat still sticking to them, where it had burnt onto the lip and the edge against the fire. Just like the fat burned onto your barbecue or your roasting pan, but seven hundred years old.

The thing I found exciting about both of these finds was not that they were made of gold or silver or had an enormous financial value. It was that they connected me to my fellow human beings, who had made and used them long ago: the hunter from so long ago who chose to make an arrow using a stone which was beautiful as well as functional; and the medieval housewife cooking her chicken or leg of lamb on a spit in front of the fire, basting it from time to time with the juices and fat collected in the dish below it. I could almost smell the roasting meat…