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Spent a whole season at Mesa Verde misreading stratigraphy before a volunteer called it out
I was on a small dig outside the park last summer, and for like 3 months I kept separating what I thought were distinct layers in one trench. Turns out those 'clean boundaries' I was so proud of were just old rodent burrow lines filled with darker soil. A retired geology teacher volunteering with us took one look and asked why I was treating a ground squirrel highway as cultural deposition. Felt like an idiot, but my unit drawings finally made sense after I re-did them. Has anyone else had a feature or natural process trick them for way too long?
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hannahcraig5d ago
The "ground squirrel highway" thing got me because I had almost the exact same deal with root casts. I mapped out this whole nice tidy sequence of thin dark bands in a sandy unit and got real smug about my profile wall. Then one of the grad students poked at one and it crumbled into this little tube shape, and yeah, those were old roots that had rotted and filled in, not separate occupations. What killed me was that they cut across the actual layering at a slight angle, which I should have caught but I was so locked in on "darker equals older" that I never looked twice. Now I always trace a boundary with a trowel before I draw it, and if it wanders or pinches out, I start asking what animal or plant did that instead of what person did. Kind of funny that the natural stuff trips you up way harder than the cultural stuff ever does.
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