Post-Ex: My Favourite Find of Summer 2025

A medieval tile complete with paw print, excavated in York.

Under the earth on a scrap of land between a set of garages and the end of a set of terraced houses, the kind of green space that we might walk past every day without a further thought, were dozens up on dozens of the traces of human history  Scraps of pottery, a bent iron nail, some pieces of broken tile, a few pieces of copper and glass, the odd bead.  To most - detritus - passed over and forgotten about.  But to the historian, to the archaeologist, these are where we find the footprints of the peoples of the past.  By examining these fragments we can gain an insight into the lives of the general populations of past societies - the kind of people who never appear in the great chronicles of the Middle Ages, nor the pages of the newspapers of later times.  It is in these scraps of evidence we find the lives of the butchers, potters, blacksmiths, and others who made up the fabric - in some cases quite literally - of society as a whole.  Each artefact adds more data and more nuance to our understand of the past.  Underneath our feat we can find the imprint of human existence stretch back into the past under the soil, just as much as in the castles and cathedrals of Europe.  They tell us sometimes in great detail of the lives of those who lived and worked in the communities that came before our time.  My favourite find of this last summer is one such item.  On a site which gave up a remarkable amount of medieval tile - including a near complete tiled hearth from the later Middle Ages - two particular fragments stood out.  One of them is pictured above - a broken piece of medieval tile, which clearly shows the footprint of a dog.  The making of the simplest of medieval tiles was, loosely, a four step process - the clay would be dug out and then shaped into tiles, which were then allowed to dry either in the sun or in open sheds to gradually reduce the amount of moisture they contained - before finally they were kiln fired.  At some point during this third stage this particular tile was walked across by dog.  Whether the animal was owned by the tilemaker or one of their neighbours - we do not know - but a quick examination of medieval manuscripts provides ample elements of both medieval dogs and cats.  Cats have also been known to leave their impression on tiles from the Roman period - as in this example uncovered in 2015 on a tile excavated in 1969 in Gloucester.  In this case this single find, something that might easily have been overlooked, gives us a clue to the close proximity in which humans and animals existed in past societies.