Always thought old dig photos were useless until I had to map a site from 1972

I spent years ignoring black and white excavation photos from the 70s, thinking we had better records now. Then I tried to match an old trench to modern GPS coordinates for a new project near Stonehenge, and those blurry images were the only thing that showed where the backfill actually was. How many of us are tossing old site photos because they seem outdated?

3 comments

3 Comments

ivan_mason21d ago

Wait, you actually had a site from 1972 with photos that weren't just dust and glare? Most of the ones I've seen from that era look like someone took them through a Vaseline lens. I remember digging through a box of slides from a 1968 excavation near Avebury and half of them were just dirt with a trowel in the corner, no scale or north arrow in sight. It's crazy how those blurry images can be the missing piece when modern GPS data gets overwritten or lost in a server crash.

sean_torres7121d ago

Raw slides beat lost hard drives every time.

rowanharris21d ago

Hang on, isn't Avebury more of a Neolithic site though? I thought most work there was way earlier than 1968. But I totally get what you mean about those blurry slides being unexpectedly useful. I've got a few from a dig my dad was on in the 80s, and one shot of a posthole with no scale is somehow the only clear photo of a specific soil layer we had. It's wild how we trust GPS data so much, but a single out-of-focus slide from 40 years ago can save the whole interpretation when the digital files vanish.