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Warning: cataloging pottery shards from a single dig site took me almost 3 months
I kept finding pieces from the same broken pot scattered across different layers, which messed up my dating. Has anyone else had a single artifact throw off their whole site timeline?
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joseph_adams661mo ago
Honestly, that's a nightmare. Tbh I'd be looking at possible animal activity or water flow moving pieces down through the soil over time. Ngl, had a rodent burrow once that pushed a coin down like two feet, totally screwed up a layer.
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jesse_fisher1mo ago
Yeah, that's the worst kind of site mystery. @joseph_adams66, your rodent story just gave me a new fear to add to the list. Now I'll be blaming every out-of-place find on some vindictive squirrel with a personal grudge against archaeology. It's bad enough when the layers are a mess without imagining a whole underground network of tiny thieves moving our stuff around.
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