For example, [this](https://i.cbc.ca/1.6816670.1682003854!/fileImage/httpImage/1-000-year-old-canoe.jpg) 1,000 year old canoe was found in a North Carolina lake. How did they discover that it was a canoe? To me it looks like every other piece of wood at the bottom of a lake. They can’t study every piece of debris they find at a lake to tell which are artifacts and which arent
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Training.
A field botanist, for example, will **see** and identify any plant on a trip – to him they are individuals – while to the layman it’s just undifferentiated “vegetation”. Same for birds, mushrooms, fish, insects, &c.
Similarly for human artefacts. When a plane flies by you probably just notice, if you even look up, “a plane”. Not so for a dedicated plane watcher. (For my part I’m absolutely not interested in cars, thus they all look alike to me.)
So let’s complete that to “training + interest”.
For the canoe case, an archaeologist will take a hard look at any piece of wood which could potentially be an artefact, drawing from his experience of similar objects, looking for tool marks, wear, the nature of the wood (does it come from the region or from far away) and so on, while the average Joe just glances at “a soaked log” and walks on.
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