ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between things and memory, and colours the challenge of excavating memories of an object and its place in history. Much of archaeology is a tactile experience. Someone with scarred and roughened hands and weather-beaten, chapped skin. Someone who didn't concern himself much with the intellectual challenges of theoretical archaeology. It describes as a historical archaeologist with an interest in contemporary archaeology. Three things made this story even more fascinating. Firstly, the same burial contained a second small bowl, again bearing an illiterate stamp, this one consisting of a zigzag line Memories of the making and the thinking that created those illiterate potters' stamps. Memories of the physical act of picking up a knife or a nail and scratching that X of ownership. All light-hearted fun, but now, through that prosaic platter with its illiterate stamp and clumsily scratched X, two people from the distant past reached through the centuries and touched.
