My anthro professor in 2009 said to never trust a surface find, and I finally got why last week

Faith Chen · 2026-10-15T08:45:05.205929+00:00

Back in 2009 at a field school outside Tucson, my professor told us to never record a surface find as a real site until we did a shovel test. I thought he was being lazy about paperwork. Fast forward to last week. I was walking a wash near Sonoita and picked up what looked like a perfect Hohokam sherd, painted red on buff, sitting right on top of the gravel. Turned out to be a piece of a modern flower pot from somebody's yard upstream. Two days later my buddy found an actual mano on a cut bank about 40 feet away, and that one held up under a test pit. Here is the debate I want to settle. Some folks I dig with say surface finds are still worth recording because context is context, even if it washed in. Others say they just clutter the site database and waste survey hours. Where do you all land on this? Do washed in artifacts deserve a site number or not?

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My anthro professor in 2009 said to never trust a surface find, and I finally got why last week | Archaeology Discoveries - Guest Forum