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A museum volunteer in Kansas City told me to always photograph the dirt before I touch anything, and it saved my whole summer
Two summers back I was helping sift at a small dig site outside Lawrence, Kansas, and I was brand new to it. An older volunteer named Ruth, who had been doing field work since the 80s, pulled me aside on day one and said, quote, the dirt is the find, the object is just the souvenir. I nodded and honestly forgot about it for two weeks. Then I pulled a little bone fragment out of a screen and before I could even set it down I had knocked a pile of loose matrix off the edge with my elbow. Everything in that square got mixed up and we lost the exact layer it came from. Ruth just looked at me and said, see, that is why we shoot the hole first. After that I started taking a photo of the trench wall and the screen with my phone before I moved anything, even if it was just a rock. Three weeks later we hit a patch of burned clay and because I had before shots of the whole area, the grad student running the dig could actually place it in the right level. It sounds so simple and I felt like an idiot for not doing it sooner. Does anyone else have a habit like this that sounds obvious but nobody teaches you up front?
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