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Hot take: The worst moment of my career was watching a 3,000-year-old wall crumble in Turkey

We were carefully exposing a Hittite fortification near Hattusa last spring, and a volunteer with a trowel got overexcited and took a huge chunk out of the mudbrick... I had to stop the whole dig, document the damage meticulously, and spend the next two weeks just stabilizing the section. How do you guys handle the gut-punch feeling when something on site gets broken, even a little bit?
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2 Comments
jade_grant95
Oh man, that's brutal. I had a volunteer once who thought a pottery shard was a rock and chucked it into the spoil heap. The gut punch is real. You just have to take a deep breath, maybe scream into your field notebook for a second, and then do exactly what you did. It's all damage control after that.
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joseph_hart
Just focus on fixing it, not the sick feeling.
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