Chicken! (Or, well... probably not.)

Archaeology usually is the discovery of quite, um, durable stuff. There's a good reason why ceramics are the key find category, and also key dating things - ceramic objects were a staple of daily use as vessels, containers, and tableware plus a few other things; thus they were subject to change over time, with changing tastes and preferences of the buyers. There's quality differences in clay, and in production quality. Rim forms change over time,  quickly enough to be useful for dating (though in some cases still keeping things vague). Best of all for the archaeologist, ceramic is rather breakable and the shards cannot be recycled as easily as broken metal can be, or destroyed as used-up wooden items can.

Eggs, now, eggs are a totally different thing - and not something you usually find. Not even eggshells, as they are basically a thin mineral shell, which tends to dissolve in the soil - doubly so in acidic soil, which most environments have.

However, as unlikely as it is, an excavation in Berryfields in the UK has hit the Roman era jackpot and unearthed, literally, four chicken eggs from Roman time - one of them intact. You can read more about this in the Current Archaeology article here (including a picture of the egg).

I confess that the first thought I had when I saw the title of the article, even before I clicked the link, was "Yay Jurassic Parc!" as in chickens are basically small dinosaurs, and it would be beyond cool to get the DNA from that egg and clone a real, honest-to-goodness Roman era chicken. Be.Yond.Cool.

Unfortunately, though not unexpectedly, the article mentions nothing about DNA analysis or chicken cloning. Still. I'm hoping. It's basically the closest we can get to a time-machine transporting a past chicken into our day, right?