Had a talk with a retired archaeologist that made me rethink the whole 'dig slow' rule

I was out at a site in Flagstaff last month, just doing some survey work, and I got to chatting with this guy who worked on the Mesa Verde projects back in the 80s. He told me they used to power through trenches in a week that would take us a month now, just to get a broad picture before the Feds locked the land down. It hit me different because here I am taking three days to scrape one tiny test pit for context, but maybe we overdo it sometimes. Has anyone else felt like the modern pace misses the big story for all the little details?

2 comments

2 Comments

ivan_mason1mo ago

...my buddy works for a state DOT and he told me they did a highway bypass out in Colorado a few years back. They had like three weeks to clear a whole valley before the bulldozers came. So they just went in with shovels and metal detectors, pulled out all the visible artifacts real fast, and then let the machines do their thing. They lost a ton of small context stuff but they found like four whole pueblo room blocks nobody knew existed. In my experience that trade off can be worth it sometimes, especially when the alternative is nothing at all.

grantf731mo ago

Read a paper last year about a salvage dig in the Four Corners area where they just surface collected and did rapid test trenches before a pipeline went in. They ended up mapping over 50 sites that way, things that would have taken years to excavate properly. The author argued that sometimes the big picture data is more valuable than the micro context we chase now. Makes me wonder if we've swung too far the other direction from those old school days.