I finally listened to Dr. Rivera about the soil layers at the Mesa Verde dig

Back in 2018 she told me to stop digging past the first dark stripe because that's where the real artifacts hide, and I thought she was being overly cautious. Sure enough, three days later I pulled a broken pot fragment from exactly that layer while another volunteer found a turquoise bead in the next stripe over. Has anyone else had a supervisor's gut feeling save them from messing up a site?

2 comments

2 Comments

susan3509d ago

Oh man, I've definitely been there! My supervisor at a shell midden site in Florida stopped me from digging into what I thought was just a weird sand layer, and it turned out to be a buried hearth with charcoal and fish bones. Saved me from contaminating a really important feature that ended up being dated to 3,000 years old. Did you get to keep any of the pottery or beads you found?

rivera.susan9d ago

Actually I gotta push back on keeping artifacts. In most states it's illegal to take anything from an excavation site unless you have a permit, and even then everything gets cataloged and stored at a museum or lab. I get the temptation, but taking pottery or beads home just robs future researchers of data. Better to take photos and make sketches instead.