A stranger at the dig site in York made me rethink old field notes

Last Saturday I was at a volunteer cleanup near a Roman site in York and this elderly guy, probably 80, came up to me while I was labeling finds. He asked if I ever kept handwritten notes from way back. I said yeah, I have a box from my first season in 2004. He told me to go read the margins, not the main entries. He said field notes are the only thing that records what we thought before we knew better. So I dug out that box last night and sure enough, I had circled this odd pottery shard and wrote 'maybe ritual?' next to it. I chased that thought for years and always assumed it was just junk. Now a team found the same style near a well and it might be exactly that. He never even gave his name. Has anyone else gone back to old notes and found something that hit different with new eyes?

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