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I always thought you had to dig deep to find the good stuff
I was watching a documentary about a dig in Scotland, and they kept talking about surface surveys... I figured they were just killing time before the real work. Then they showed how a team walked a grid for two weeks, picking up pottery shards and flint flakes right on top, and it mapped a whole Iron Age settlement without moving a single big rock. My whole idea of archaeology was just big holes and treasure, not reading the ground like that. Anyone else have their basic idea of a field totally flipped by a simple method?
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craig.piper9d ago
Totally, like what @craig.parker said about crime scenes.
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craig.parker9d ago
That documentary sounds familiar. It's wild how much gets missed by only looking for the big, deep finds. Modern archaeology is basically crime scene work on a huge scale, where a single nail or a stain in the dirt tells the whole story. They can figure out trade routes and daily life from stuff people just dropped and forgot about.
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finley_smith9d ago
Forget the big stuff, I'm obsessed with what they find in ANCIENT trash pits. The broken plates and gnawed bones tell you more about real life than any fancy treasure.
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