After several decades of people asking me "what is the most valuable thing
you ever found?", I finally had someone ask the other day "what was the
most memorable thing you ever found?"

Having wished for several decades that people would ask this sort of
question, I had a ready answer (although not then given in such a
long-winded form):

Back in the mid-1990s I was monitoring the removal of a large parking lot
at the Calvert Mansion, Riversdale, in Riverdale, near College Park
Maryland.  The area had been heavily disturbed in building the parking lot
in the 1960s and during construction projects at the mansion in the
1930s.  Many archaeological features remained intact, but we stayed clear
of them if they were not to be impacted.  That left us doing a lot of
mapping and collecting lots of artifacts that had lost their context in the
various disturbances over the years.  One soggy late-winter day an elderly
lady wandered in to see what we were digging and I eagerly listened as she
told stories of how she used to play in the house as a child (it had been
the home of Hiram Johnson, Governor of California 1911-1915, California
Senator 1917-1923, and some credit / blame him with making California the
wacky state that it is today [he would have loved the recent recall
election]).  For some years after Johnson lived there the house had been
abandoned and the old lady recalled the deserted house, with its beautiful
marble fireplaces, broken statuary in the attic, and a once fine piano that
had lost all its ivories to the pocket knives of prying young boys.  She
said that the poor piano, with its toothless grin, had haunted her all her
life, for pianos can are such beautiful things.  As she said that I reached
into the day's artifact bag and retrieved a single slice of ivory that had
just been found near the house and we assume had once adorned the home's piano.

I thought she was going to pass away right then and there.  It was deep, to
say the least.

Lets start a thread with anecdotes of your most memorable finds.

        Dan W.