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Working on that dig in southern Utah back in 2015 completely changed how I handle surface surveys
I mean, we were out there for weeks, just walking transects and picking up every little piece of chert we saw. The lead archaeologist, Dr. Vance, was super old school. He had us logging everything, even the tiniest flakes, by hand in these massive field books. It felt like we were moving at a snail's pace, and honestly, I thought it was a huge waste of a sunny afternoon. Then one day, a grad student brought out this tablet with a new mapping app. We started dropping GPS pins for every find instead. In like two hours, we had a clear scatter pattern that would've taken us two days to plot manually. It showed a tool-making site right near a dry creek bed we'd totally missed. Idk, maybe it's just me, but that was the moment I realized tech wasn't just for the lab anymore. Has anyone else had a simple piece of tech totally flip a field method for them?
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elliot_gibson271d ago
Yeah, drones are basically cheat codes for spotting that stuff now lol.
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seth_singh201d ago
Totally get what you mean about tech flipping a field method. I had a similar thing on a volunteer survey where we switched from paper maps to a simple drone for overview shots. Seeing the layout from above in real time on a phone showed us a subtle ridge line we'd walked right past that was full of artifacts.
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