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The grad student at my field school said 'never trust a shovel test deeper than 30cm' and it saved our whole season
Back in 2019 I was at a dig outside Tucson and this third year grad student kept telling us shovel tests past 30cm are a waste unless you hit a feature, which I thought was just laziness at the time. Sure enough our unit leader kept pushing us past 60cm for two weeks and we found nothing but sterile caliche while the other units hit occupational layers at 25cm. Has anyone else had a crew chief or student who just would not listen to the basic stratigraphy? What would you have done?
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elizabethg148d ago
Oh man this hits home! I read a blog post from a CRM archaeologist a while back who said the same thing about shovel tests, that past a certain depth you're just burning time and money unless there's a real reason to keep going. The whole point is to find where the dirt CHANGES, not to prove you can dig a deep hole. Kind of wild that a unit leader would ignore stratigraphy when the other units were literally showing you where the layers were sitting. I'd have pulled up the site records or asked the other crew to show them their profile walls, sometimes people need to SEE it before it clicks. Worst case you go over their head to the PI because two weeks of sterile caliche is a season killer.
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