A Taste of Time

In my time of youthful innocence, I had dreams of grandeur. I wanted to be Indiana Jane, bush whacking through wildernesses and surviving the elements in search of a part of us we lost. I pursued this dream for a moment, brief though it was, before the bitter realities of life’s demands set in. In my pursuits, I learned some interesting things along the way. One of my favorite tidbits was how to distinguish bone fragments from pottery shards.

You would think the two would be distinctly different and that there would be no confusion, but there I was digging under the shade of an erected canopy that protected us from the punishing desert sun when I witnessed the most unusual behavior. A seasoned archaeologist licked what looked like a shard of pottery. I was flabbergasted by the act.

I had heard veterans of the trade swear they could guess the age of artifacts by tasting them. They said the longer an artifact had been in the ground, the saltier it would taste. I had never found out if they were pulling my leg or if there was a science behind it. I figured that the archaeologist was tasting the age, but she did something that gave me even greater pause. She didn’t throw the shard into the pottery bucket. She threw it into the organic materials bucket.

I looked down into the bucket and then back at her confused. It sure did look like a piece of pottery. “Why did you throw that in there,” I asked feeling dubious of her decision.

“It’s a bone,” she answered.

I gingerly plucked it from the bucket. When you are new to things, sometimes a harmless prank or two is cast upon you till you learn the ropes, so I was prone to investigating oddities such as that. I examined the bone. It was smooth and glossy. No marrow showed on the surfaces either. I frowned at the fragment.

“How can you tell this is bone,” I inquired.

She smiled big and handed me a pottery shard from the pottery bucket, “Lick this,” she ordered.

I hesitated to follow her order. It felt taboo to put something so delicate, old and precious in my mouth. She pulled a shard out herself and licked it before urging me, “go on, give it a lick.”

“Um, ok?” I said uncomfortable with the request. Nonetheless, I followed through and gave it a lick. The earthy tang of dirt and the grit of sand grazed my tongue making me grimace.

She laughed and said, “You notice how your tongue slide right off of it?”

I nodded, not understanding where this was going.

She handed the fragment of bone back to me and said, “drink some water and then lick this.”

I really felt like I was being messed with at this point. Not to mention, it was gross to put something in my mouth that someone else had already licked. Well, I guess it is gross to lick things that have been in the ground for millennia as well, but I had committed by this point. I swigged some water and then stuck out my tongue for a lick.

She watched me with narrowed eyes as my tongue caught on the bones surface. The bone stuck to my tongue as if it were sticky. She smiled and elaborated, “Bone sticks to your tongue whereas petrified wood, rocks and ceramics will slide right off.”

It was a funny, quirky thing I discovered that day. I feel like I had cheated all the fancy school labs with this simple litmus test. It also makes me smile when I tell people I used to taste ancient artifacts and I see the reaction on their faces. I know I must have worn that face once and their reactions always bring me back to that simple discovery, so I am always happy to share this silly fun fact.