Annika's Pottery Shard with Fingerprint

My object is a Roman pottery piece. 2000 years ago the Romans travelled up the Rhine (Germany's main river). They took over a place called Mainz where my granddad lives. 40 years ago, some people wanted to build a Hilton hotel in Mainz. But they found a number of ancient objects (from the Romans), so they had to stop.
After ten long years, the archaeologists uncovered five military ships, and many interesting objects. They also asked the people from the museums to choose what they wanted. Then they found out that there were still lots of unimportant pottery left over in the earth so they opened the dig site and let the people of Mainz try their luck in finding small objects at the dig. My mum and her family found some pieces of pottery and put them in a box. My grandpa put some in his terrace, he likes to think it's the oldest terrace in Germany. I found the box last summer when I was snooping around. My grandpa let me have a piece, I chose one piece in particular because it had a thumb print on it in red paint. The thumb print is smaller than my thumb and so it must have been done by a child.