Showerthought: I spent a whole dig season brushing dirt off the wrong side of a wall

I was working on a site in New Mexico last fall, carefully cleaning what I thought was a collapsed adobe wall. For weeks, my team and I were brushing away soil from one side, documenting every little thing. Then our lead archaeologist, Dr. Chen, walked over, looked at the soil layers for about 30 seconds, and said, 'You're cleaning the backfill from a 1920s excavation trench, not the wall itself.' The actual wall face was on the complete opposite side, buried under way less dirt. We'd basically been meticulously uncovering someone else's old trash pile. Has anyone else had a moment where you realized you were interpreting a feature totally backwards?

2 comments

2 Comments

beth_sanchez7d ago

See how often we clean the wrong side of a wall in our own lives.

grant.margaret7d ago

Honestly, therapy helped me figure that out.