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Unpopular opinion: I stopped washing pottery sherds at the lab after a volunteer rinsed off 800 years of residue in Tucson
She meant well but that one rinse killed the protein traces we needed for dating, so now I bag everything dry and flag anything with visible crust for the real analysts, anyone else had a well meaning helper wipe out a season of samples?
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nora_baker1mo ago
Did you see that thread on the archaeology subreddit last month about the same thing? Some grad student had their whole flotation sample set ruined because a visiting researcher decided the buckets looked dirty and dumped them out. There was also a story going around about a museum where a janitor threw out tagged bone fragments because they were in old paper bags. The worst part is you can never really be mad at them, they were just trying to help. Now everything in my lab has bright red tags that say DO NOT TOUCH in like three languages.
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