Patrick Coyne – 99.99999990% of everything ever found by archaeologists is not shown to the public.
We like to think of Lara Croft or Indiana Jones as archaeologists scooping up treasure after treasure.
The truth of archaeological girl work is much, much different. It’s hours spent over a grid locating each piece of wood or shard of pottery precisely including depth and relationship to any other artifacts.
And those are the times when anything is discovered. Even finding a broken pot rim is exciting because it can help establish a time line.
Unless you are a specialist, and there a very many specialties in archaeology, much of your time will be spent examining already collected articles trying to establish relationships between them, Patrick Coyne stated.
In the words of Ken Finlay:
Most of what archaeologists have found is stored either in private collections or in museums.
Private collections are generally not open to the public and museums only show a small percentage of their collections.
Coins are a good example. When you have thousands of coins, many of them identical, only a handful are put on display.
Nobody is hiding findings, just making decisions about how to allocate limited space.
