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Compared two excavation methods at a site near Tucson and one was clearly better
I helped on a dig last month where we used both a trowel and a screen sifter for the same trench section. The screen sifter caught way more small bone fragments and seed beads than I ever saw with just the trowel work. Is there a reason some crews still skip the sifter when it catches so much more detail?
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thomas.piper3mo ago
The screen sifter is great for tiny stuff, but some crews skip it because it's way slower and you have to haul all that dirt back to camp to process it (which is a real pain in the heat). I remember one time we found an entire tiny obsidian bird bead in the sifter that nobody would've spotted in the trench - but the lead archaeologist still complained about the extra setup time.
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violagonzalez3mo ago
Ugh, that sounds so familiar! My buddy on a dig in Arizona told me they skipped the sifter once and ended up missing a whole shell pendant that showed up later in the back dirt pile.
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