The Finds That Started on the Wrong Errand
A well dug for water, a rock thrown after a goat, a dog down a hole, and a hammer a friend had mislaid.
Nobody in these stories set out to find what they found. Farmers in a drought wanted water. A teenager wanted a goat. An eighteen-year-old wanted his dog. A retired gardener wanted a hammer back. The thing in the ground was somebody else’s errand.
In the spring of 1974, farmers near Xi’an struck a clay face while digging a well and opened the roof of a buried army. In the winter of 1946–47, a Bedouin teenager threw a rock into a cave after a stray goat and heard a jar break. The Dead Sea Scrolls were inside. In September 1940, a dog disappeared down a hole above Montignac, and the boy who followed him found the painted chamber at Lascaux. On 16 November 1992, Eric Lawes swept a Suffolk field for Peter Whatling’s hammer and stopped digging when the spoons and coins started coming up. The hammer is in the British Museum too, catalogued as a modern iron tool. In 1963, a man in Derinkuyu knocked down a wall in his house and opened a city cut into the rock under the floor. In June 2016, turf cutter Jack Conway hit a twenty-two-pound lump of butter twelve feet down in an Irish bog. It had been there about two thousand years.
This page is the shelf those errands share. Start here for the terracotta army, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Lascaux, and for the longer record of finds that began as a chore.
- The 22-Pound Lump of 2,000-Year-Old Butter Turf Cutters Dug Out of a Bog
- The Basement Wall That Opened Onto a City for 20,000 People
- The Lost Hammer That Led to 14,865 Roman Coins — and Got Its Own Museum Number
- The Buried Army Found by Farmers Digging a Well
- The Runaway Goat That Led to the Dead Sea Scrolls
- The Teenagers Who Found a 20,000-Year-Old Art Gallery