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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Plumbata, post: 3180923, member: 96864&quot;]If you&#039;re interested in some fascinating context and related Post-War archaeological experiences a great author I&#039;d recommend is Ivor Noel Hume. I came across his book &quot;All The Best Rubbish&quot; at a library sale as a child and his stories were irresistible. He told of construction projects in bombed-out London uncovering basements full of 17th century &quot;sealed&quot; (bearing a glass stamp with the year and/or initials of the commissioner of the bottles) wine bottles that the workers were breaking against a wall for fun (1,000+ each minimum now), rare antiquarian books and irreplaceable written records he saved from being burned for heat, and other tales of his archaeological rescue work (Plenty of great reading regarding Roman sites) amidst a country where so much more was being lost every day due to ignorance or the priorities of survival and reconstruction. I&#039;d imagine that the austerity of post-war life didn&#039;t inspire much widespread investment in the research and pursuit of antiques and antiquities, especially relatively mundane items like 10 tons of nails, which the necessarily practical re-builders of the country likely viewed as more useful converted to I-beams than inventory taking up space. It&#039;s all terribly unfortunate, but it was more &quot;costly&quot; for the average person to store unpractical items and curiosities back then. In my own experience excavating 100+ year-old garbage dumps, finding nice Indian artifacts suggests that while a person might have picked up the piece and looked it over at home, it was obviously deemed unworthy of storing forever.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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