My trench dig in Crete turned up a Roman coin from 200 years later

I was helping out on a small survey near Knossos last spring, just a two week volunteer stint. We were cleaning out a test pit that should have been all Minoan pottery shards, nothing fancy. About three feet down I pulled up this little bronze coin with a corroded emperor's face on it. The lead archaeologist got excited and said it was probably from the 3rd century AD, way past the era we were mapping. Turns out the site had a much later farmhouse built right over the older ruins, and the coin got shoved into the fill during some repair work. We ended up expanding the trench another four meters and found a hearth and some iron nails from that later period. It made me realize how messy archaeological layers can be, even when the initial survey hints at one clear date. Has anyone else hit a clear mismatch like that where the artifacts totally contradicted the site's expected timeline?

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