That old field notebook my professor gave me had a key that saved a dig

Back in 2019 I was working on a site near Santa Fe and we kept finding these odd ceramic shards that didn't match anything in the local typology. My old archaeology professor from college told me to check his handwritten field notes from 1972... he'd dug in the same area and drew sketches of similar pieces. I blew it off for two weeks thinking the tech was better than some old notebook. Finally pulled it out and he had a margin note that identified them as a forgotten trade ware from a pueblo that collapsed in the 1300s. We were about to label them as intrusive. Has anyone else had an old-timer's notes save them from a big mistake?

2 comments

2 Comments

thompson.tyler13d agoProlific Poster

Yeah I gotta push back on this a little. I mean sure, it's cool that the old notebook had the answer, but was it really gonna be that big of a mistake? You would have labeled them wrong initially but eventually someone would have figured it out. The tech might not have had that specific margin note but carbon dating or a better specialist would have caught it. At both your dig and @blake_martinez's thing with the bison bones, those finds still end up getting dated properly at some point. It's not like you were gonna throw the pottery in a dumpster or the bones out with the trash, the stuff was already in a collection somewhere. I feel like people get too dramatic about the "what if" without realizing the science has multiple ways to correct a first guess.

blake_martinez13d ago

Had a buddy at a dig in Colorado almost toss out some bone fragments because they looked like cow bones. His advisor's old field sketches showed they were actually butchered bison from a site way older than anyone thought.