My worst dig week ended with a goat eating our field notes near Jerash

Last spring I spent six days on a survey project outside Jerash, Jordan, and everything that could go wrong did. Day one my trowel handle snapped clean off while I was scraping a test pit, so I spent 40 bucks on a replacement that felt like it was made of tin foil. By Wednesday we had a dust storm that covered every find bag in grit, and I accidentally labeled a Roman pottery sherd as Ottoman because I could barely see through my goggles. The real kicker came Friday afternoon, when a local goat wandered into our base camp and ate the corner of our field notebook, including the page with all our grid coordinates for the eastern trench. My supervisor just stared at me and said, "Well, that's a new one for the report." We spent the next two hours re-walking the grid lines to redo the measurements, and I still have a photo of that goat with notebook paper sticking out of its mouth. Has anyone else had animals mess with their excavation records, or am I the only one who lost data to livestock?

0 comments

0 Comments

No comments yet

Be the first to share your thoughts on this discussion.