Hot take: the dig site near my hometown was a total mess last summer

I work on small digs around Montana during breaks. Last August we found a site near Bozeman that had been opened by amateurs 3 years earlier. They left trash, moved bones out of context, and even took some artifacts home. The worst part is the local museum won't even touch it now because the chain of evidence is ruined. Has anyone else run into a site that got messed up by people who didn't know what they were doing?

2 comments

2 Comments

casey161mo agoMost Upvoted

The best thing we did was get the local archaeology department from the college involved early. They sent a grad student out to look at the site before we did anything else. That helped us figure out what was worth keeping and what was just trash left by the amateurs. We also marked every bone with a GPS tag before moving anything. It took extra time but it saved the site for proper study later. The museum ended up taking our material because we could show exactly where everything came from.

daniel59329d ago

Yeah, I'll admit I used to be one of those guys who figured if it's old and interesting, just dig it up and sort it out later. Never really thought about how much context matters. But reading this, the GPS tagging thing really hit home. I get how just knowing where something was found is half the science, especially if you want anyone with actual credentials to take it seriously. Kinda changes how you look at the whole "get while the gettin's good" mindset.