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My old professor told me to always check the spoil pile, and man was he right
Back in college, I had this archaeology prof who was a real stickler for the basics. He'd drill into us that the most important thing you can do on a dig, besides not losing your trowel, is to sift through the spoil pile from the last shift. I thought it was busywork, just moving dirt we already looked at. Fast forward to last year, I was volunteering on a site in southern Utah, helping clear a small Anasazi pit house. The guy before me was in a hurry and dumped his last bucket without checking. I remembered the old lesson and ran my fingers through it. Found a perfect, tiny turquoise bead, about the size of a pea, that he'd missed. It was the only piece of jewelry from that whole unit. That bead changed the whole interpretation of the space. Anyone else have a simple piece of advice from training that saved your bacon later on?
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