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PSA: a site director at a dig near Tucson told me to stop bagging artifacts by depth alone, and it fixed my whole catalog
I spent two summers cataloging shovel test finds from a site outside Tucson and kept getting confused by my own notes. A visiting site director looked at my bags and asked why every level got one bag with no grid reference. She explained that bagging by depth alone means you lose where things sat east to west across the unit, which matters when you are trying to map a hearth or a trash pit. So I switched to labeling each bag with unit, level, and the exact meter coordinates, and my 340 or so entries finally lined up with the field map on the first try. It sounds obvious but nobody had ever said it out loud to me. How do you all label bags when you are working a unit fast and don't want to slow down the trowel work?
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elizabethn561d ago
I read a field manual from the Illinois State Archaeological Survey that says to write unit, level, and quadrant on the bag before you even start digging that level. Having the bags pre-labeled means you just drop the finds in and keep going, no stopping to write. It takes ten minutes at the start of the day but saves all that confusion later.
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