On archaeology

Sometimes I wish that my archaeology lab was a bit more reminiscent of Indiana Jones. I know how to use a whip (meaning that I learned one afternoon during lunch in 12th grade), and we're doing /actual/ archaeology - we pulled up a lot of brick fragments today. With my whip experience and my ability to dig and also to take very detailed notes, I'm sure I'm equipped to fight Nazis and traitorous Amazonian trail guides. Right?
Of course, there's a few types of archaeology. There's the type of archaeology where you dig a lot in a meter-square box in bright sun and get several 19th-century fragments of brick, glass, and nails. And then there's Indiana Jones. To be honest, I don't think neo-Nazis are much interested in bits of glass that were thrown out 200 years ago.
I have a feeling, though, that finding bits and pieces of brick are much more common than finding some groundbreaking new type of pottery or relic (see what I did there? Because archaeologists DIG... I've been in the sun too long). After all, everyone needed some kind of structure, and brick is very common.
I also have a feeling that the likelihood of pottery sherds is also dependent on where you're digging. We haven't found much pottery, because we're digging outside the kitchen house of a plantation. Not a lot of pottery being used, unless you count the China ceramics that one group has found. If we're excavating a place where the ancient culture is known for its pottery, people would probably be surprised NOT to find some pottery sherds. I wouldn't know what you'd supposed to find at the Agora, aside from a whole lot of marble. I suppose that's why they're still excavating it.

Being careful is also important. There was one man who was trying to find and excavate Troy - the city that sent 1000 ships after Helen. He wasn't careful. He thought he'd found Troy, though - at the very least, his team excavated SOMETHING. The city they found, though, was later dated to MUCH earlier than Helen's Troy was. While it's interesting to study the progression of how cities are built up, the dating of this Troy meant that Helen's Troy was literally thrown out with the rest of the dirt.

I guess the moral of these stories is this: don't make bad puns, Indiana Jones is not representative of all archaeologists, and don't throw out Helen's Troy because you think you're in the right layer.