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TIL you can date a site by the dirt itself, not just the stuff in it
I got into archaeology the way most people do, through the objects. I spent my first two seasons at a site outside Abilene, Texas, bagging points and pottery and treating the dirt as nothing more than the stuff I had to dig through to get to the good part. Then last spring a geoarchaeologist joined our crew and had us cut a clean face on the trench wall, and she walked us through the layers like they were a book. She pointed out a pale band about 40 centimeters down, said it was a buried A horizon from a wetter period, and told us the artifacts above and below it had to be different ages. I had been lumping everything from that square into one bag for weeks. Now I map every stratum before I pull a single flake, and I take a column sample even when it feels like overkill. We ended up rethinking the whole occupation sequence at the site, and it came from looking at brown dirt instead of pretty points. Has anyone else had a specialist change how you read a site, and what did they point out that you had been walking past?
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marymorgan12d ago
Oh man, I feel called out because I did the exact same thing my first dig, just shoveling everything into one bag like I was making dirt soup. A geoarch guy on our crew pointed out a thin dark line in the wall that turned out to be an old living surface, and I had been digging right through it for days without noticing. The thing that got me was how much the color and feel of the soil changes once you know what to look for, like wet coffee grounds versus dry sand. We ended up pushing back the date of the whole camp by like 500 years just from that one band. Now I spend half my time staring at trench walls like they owe me money, and my field notes have way more dirt descriptions than artifact counts.
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