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A museum volunteer in Tucson warned me about the pottery sherd I was holding and it changed how I look at every dig post
I was volunteering at a small museum in Tucson last spring, just sorting bags of stuff from a site near the Santa Cruz River, when an older woman who had been there for like 20 years stopped me mid-bag. I had picked up a painted sherd to show her because I thought it was cool, and she said "put it down on the tray, not in your hand, that paint is 900 years old and the salt on your skin eats it." I had been handling sherds with my bare hands for weeks at that point, just tossing them around like gravel. She then walked me through how much info gets lost when you touch surfaces, residue, wear patterns, all of it, and how the field notes from before the 1970s are basically useless for some sites because everyone grabbed stuff without gloves or context. What really hit me was when she said a single bag from our site had been "messed with" already back in the 80s by a volunteer who meant well, and now nobody can tell what was original and what got moved around. I went home and rewrote my own notes from the previous dig, because I realized I had been describing things vaguely, like "several pieces near the wall," which is useless to anyone later. Now I keep a little notebook and a 6 inch scale in my pocket even when I am just looking at photos from old digs. Anyone else here ever get corrected by someone older on a site and realize you were doing something dumb the whole time? What was the fix that stuck with you?
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taylor.hayden1mo ago
Watched a buddy of mine learn this the hard way at a rock shelter site in the Gila. He was pulling fire cracked rock out of the dirt and stacking it on a tarp like it was lawn debris, and a grad student about lost her mind because the position of every rock was the whole point. He had to sit there for two days with a total station re-recording everything he had already yanked out, and half of it was junk data by then. She told him the same thing, that a site is a puzzle and once you move a piece you can't tell where it went, and the notes are the only other copy. He still keeps a photo scale and a notebook in his truck to this day. That museum lady did you a real favor.
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