That time a museum guard showed me a pottery sherd from her pocket

I was at the Penn Museum last spring and this older guard saw me staring at a broken amphora, so she pulled out a tiny sherd she'd carried from a dig in Cyprus back in the 80s and said 'this is what they don't put in cases,' and now I can't look at any display the same way, anyone else have a random encounter like that at a site or museum?

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margaret9910d ago

Oh man, that story is the whole reason I can't do museum tours with normal people anymore. But hold on, Cypriot dig in the 80s? I gotta say, that timing is a bit off for the Penn Museum's big Cyprus digs. Most of their serious excavation work there wrapped up in the 60s and 70s, at least the ones I've read about in their own bulletins. Not saying she didn't have a sherd from Cyprus or that she lied, but maybe she meant she visited a site in the 80s as a tourist or something, because the museum's own records don't show fieldwork there that late. Anyway, the real point you made is spot on, the stuff they keep in drawers is way more alive than anything in a case. I still remember a ranger at Mesa Verde pulling out a broken corncob from her jacket and saying "we don't display these because people can't handle the real thing." That moment stuck with me way more than any fancy pot.