Showerthought: My old professor said most field reports get written wrong for the first 20 years, and after 30 digs I think he was right

Thomas Price · 2026-10-08T15:50:08.160743+00:00

Back in 1994 I took my first field school in Arizona and the site director, a man named Dr. Halbrook, told our group of 14 students that the most important part of a dig is not the finding but the writing up afterward. At the time I brushed it off, since I wanted to be the guy pulling arrowheads out of the dirt. Fast forward 30 years and I have watched three major site reports from the Southwest sit unpublished for over a decade because nobody took the notes seriously. The artifacts from one pit house were bagged without depth measurements, and now the whole stratigraphy has to be reconstructed from memory. I still have his photocopied handout somewhere in a box. Has anyone here had a project fall apart just because the paperwork was a mess?

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Showerthought: My old professor said most field reports get written wrong for the first 20 years, and after 30 digs I think he was right | Archaeology Discoveries - Vivisector