Talked to a field tech about surface finds and it hit different

I was out at a site near Santa Fe last month (a weekend volunteer dig, nothing major) and got paired with this guy named Tom who's been doing fieldwork for like 20 years. We were scanning this plowed field for pottery sherds and lithics, and he told me that most people focus too much on the pretty stuff like arrowheads or painted ceramics. He said the real story is in the plain body sherds and the broken tools, the stuff nobody wants to photograph. He showed me how those plain pieces tell you about daily life, how long people stayed, what they actually ate. That conversation made me totally rethink how I approach surface collection now. I used to grab anything with color or shape, but now I spend way more time bagging the boring stuff. Has anyone else had a volunteer experience that changed how you look at artifacts?

3 comments

3 Comments

kellygrant18d ago

You ever had a moment like that where one person just flips your whole way of seeing things? I had a similar thing with a guy who showed me how to read core samples from old trash pits... not the shiny stuff but the layers of ash and bone fragments that tell you if people were there for a season or a full year. Now I bag more of the gray, unassuming pieces because they hold way more context than a pretty point ever could.

the_alex18d ago

3 years ago a guy at a dig site tried to convince me that "every fleck of charcoal tells a story" and I just stood there thinking... man, maybe it's really not that deep. Glad it works for you @kellygrant but sometimes a pretty point is just a pretty point, you know?

charlies3717d ago

...and then there's me still trying to figure out which end of the trowel to hold.