Pro tip: Stop looking for the big find and start looking at the dirt around it
I spent years on a dig in Turkey hunting for intact pottery, thinking that was the real prize. The moment I realized I was wrong was when a visiting professor from Oxford pointed at a patch of plain, dark soil I'd brushed aside and said, 'That's your story right there.' It was a midden, a trash heap, full of tiny bone fragments and seeds that told us more about daily life than any whole vase ever could. Has anyone else had their focus completely shifted by a simple piece of advice on site?