6
That moment I realized I was excavating in the wrong direction for 4 summers
I've been digging test pits at a small site outside Flagstaff since 2021, and I always laid my grid lines north to south like the textbook said. Then last month a visiting geoarchaeologist from UNM walked over, looked at my profile wall, and asked why I was chasing the old river channel eastward when the clay lens clearly bent west. I froze because I'd been reading the stratigraphy backwards, the darker layer I thought was older was actually a later flood deposit. My whole artifact distribution map from the last two seasons is probably off by a few meters. It makes me wonder how many other basic orientation assumptions I've just accepted without questioning. Has anyone else had a big 'oh no' moment like this in the field, and how did you fix your records after the fact?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
holly_foster17d ago
UNM folks are sharp, but maybe your grid matches the modern drainage, not the old one.
2