There are a lot of artefacts in the Christchurch assemblage. We don’t have an exact count, but I’d estimate there’s somewhere between 300 000 and 400 000 objects represented. Each of these artefacts has a story, but not all of those stories are fully known. In some cases, we know where an artefact came from, who made it, who sold it, who owned it, what it was used for, how it came to be here and why it was thrown away. In other cases, we may only know the answer to one of these questions or, as is typical of archaeology, the answers to these questions only raise other questions that we don’t have answers to. Sometimes there are so many possible answers that we may never be able to narrow it down to the correct option. It’s an aspect of archaeology that gets lost a little bit in light of the attention on the information and the things we do find out – there’s still a lot of mystery in the past and sometimes that mystery, that uncertainty about how something came to be here, why it was made or bought or thrown away, becomes as much the part of an artefact story as the things we know to be true. For today’s blog, then, I’ve decided to put together a little showcase of some of the artefacts from the Christchurch assemblage whose stories are still missing a few details.
-Jessie