Unpopular opinion: I used to think digging fast was the goal until a site in New Mexico changed my mind

For my first three field seasons, I just wanted to move dirt and find stuff, so I'd blast through layers with a trowel. Last summer at a Pueblo site near Taos, my supervisor made me spend a full day on a single 1x1 meter unit, documenting every tiny change in soil color. It felt painfully slow at first. But that careful work revealed a hearth we would have totally destroyed with my old method. Now I spend twice as long on each unit, but the data is actually useful. Anyone else have a method they completely flipped on after a specific dig?

2 comments

2 Comments

jamieperez2mo ago

What about the stuff we miss when we're only focused on going down? I got stuck on a super flat site once where the real story was all in the horizontal spread, not the depth. Rushing down would have cut right through the edges of a living surface. That slow, wide scraping showed how the space was actually used. Makes you wonder how many sites we've wrecked by treating every unit like a race to the bottom.

ivanl762mo ago

I was the same way, always racing to the next feature. A dig in Virginia forced me to slow down and screen all the backdirt. Found a tiny bone needle in the screen that we never would have seen otherwise. It taught me that the goal isn't just to find the big things.