I finally saw the difference between a pro dig and an amateur one in person

I was out near Santa Fe last weekend on a guided dig with a crew from the local archaeology society. We were working a site that had some Pueblo pottery shards near the surface. The guy running the show, old Dr. Hendricks, pointed out how a homeowner had tried to dig up a fire pit in their yard a few years back and basically destroyed any context. You could see the difference in the soil layers clear as day where they had just shoveled through everything. Where we were working, we were using trowels and brushes and marking every depth change. The contrast was wild. Has anyone else seen how much damage a bad dig does compared to a careful one?

3 comments

3 Comments

vera_lewis21d ago

Watched a guy with a backhoe try to salvage arrowheads from a creek bed near Lubbock once. He just scooped up everything down to the clay in about ten minutes flat. Took the local club a whole weekend to sift through his spoil piles and we still lost any way to tell what layers the points came from. The soil looked like a churned up mess compared to the careful cut banks we usually work with.

sean_cooper581d ago

Man that bit about "losing any way to tell what layers the points came from" really hits home. People don't realize how much info gets destroyed when you skip the context. I've seen guys pull up Clovis points from deep gravel beds that were only datable because we could trace the exact soil horizon they came from. Without that, it's just a cool rock. That backhoe guy probably thought he was being smart getting all the artifacts fast, but he basically turned a archaeological site into a pile of gravel with no story attached. The local club spending a weekend sifting sounds like they were just doing damage control at that point.

murray.jana1d ago

Idk, I think it's actually not just about losing the layers. I mean, even from the spoil piles you can sometimes get some rough dating from the soil matrix itself if you know what to look for. But yeah, that story still makes me cringe because once you churn that clay up, you lose all the fine details like charcoal flecks or small bone fragments that specialists use to pin down the age. That guy probably thought he was being a clever salvage guy but it sounds like he just made a mess that took forever to clean up.