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Professor told me to skip the shiny artifacts, best advice I ever ignored
Back in 2019 during a dig near Santa Fe, my field school professor kept saying always document the potsherds before the pretty stuff. I thought she was nuts. So I spent a whole afternoon photographing a really nice turquoise pendant we found, like 40 shots from every angle. Then I got to the sherd pile and rushed through it in 15 minutes. Turns out that sherd pile had a rim piece with a repair hole that rewrote how we thought that site traded with pueblos 80 miles north. Professor just looked at me and said slow is smooth. Now I tell every new volunteer the same thing but nobody listens until they miss something. Has anyone else had an advisor's boring rule turn out to be the real key?
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ben66226d ago
I've made that mistake before, now I shoot everything in a grid pattern so I can't play favorites with the pretty stuff. Takes longer but you never know what's gonna matter. The rim sherds and lithics always end up being the real story anyway.
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