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My professor told me to focus on soil layers at the Roman site in York, and it completely changed how I see excavation.
He said 'the real story is in the dirt, not the stones,' and after finding a perfectly preserved leather shoe in a trench we almost skipped, I finally get it, so what's the best piece of field advice you've ever gotten?
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xena_thomas915mo ago
My old crew boss told me to always check the spoil heap twice. Said the new guys toss the good stuff with the rocks. Found a whole intact clay pipe that way. His point was you miss things when you're only looking for the big finds. That shoe story proves it. The small stuff in the dirt tells you how people actually lived.
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the_anthony5mo ago
My first dig I almost threw out a tiny carved bone bead for the same reason!
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oliviac224mo ago
Yeah, and it's wild how our brains are trained to look for the "important" stuff. @the_anthony almost tossing that bead is a perfect example. We're scanning for coins or pottery, not a bit of worn bone. But that bead was probably someone's favorite thing, carried around for years. It makes you wonder what else we've missed because it didn't look shiny or big. The real story is in the small, worn-out junk people used every single day.
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