Freddie and I are artefact specialists and we both followed similar paths. I did a PhD that allowed me to study Iron Age glass beads and other artefacts, which allowed me to gain an in depth understanding about how dress was constructed during the Iron Age and Roman period. I did my research by reading hundreds of excavation reports to build an artefact dataset from published and unpublished reports and I visited collections that were mostly held in museums. A couple of the collections I recorded were from recent excavations and had not been deposited at a museum yet and were still in the care of commercial archaeology units. I think recording these collections well and truly set me on the path to becoming a finds specialist, because I sent the archaeology companies each a report on their assemblages. This was a good learning experience, as I had never written an artefact report before and didn’t know anyone that could guide me. I had read plenty of finds reports by that stage, both published and commercial grey literature reports, so I at least had an idea of what I was aiming for, but no real way of knowing whether what I was writing was correct.