Found face down in the newly discovered trash pit, the dig's first intact delftware tile sparked lots of excitement until expectant archaeologists flipped it over. That's when the fuzzy image on the front reminded them of the high rate of manufacturing flaws that made such objects costly - and now marks the contexts in which they're unearthed as exceptionally high status. "We had bets on what kind of design we would see. But when we turned it over, all we saw was this blurry guy with a staff," Jamestown Rediscovery curator Bly Straube says. "It was a second - and that's probably why it survived in one piece. They just set it aside instead of using it."
This is actually a recurring series which I haven't been posting, but I might start.