Shoutout to the team at the Cahokia dig last summer

I mean, I was just a volunteer helping with the soil screening, mostly finding bits of shell and small rocks. But one afternoon, after about three hours of finding nothing, I spotted a tiny piece of worked chert, maybe half an inch long. The lead archaeologist, Dr. Evans, showed me how to log its exact location and bag it properly. That small find, and her taking the time to explain, totally changed how I look at the whole process. Now I'm way more patient and careful with every single bucket of dirt I go through. Has anyone else had a small moment like that on a dig that just clicked for you?

2 comments

2 Comments

angelapalmer2d ago

Dr. Evans sounds like a great mentor. Did she show you how to log the piece on the site grid or just with the bucket coordinates? That level of detail always seemed like the real magic to me.

the_beth2d ago

Wait, you were only logging finds by the bucket they came from? That seems wild to me. Our site made us plot everything on the full site grid, down to the centimeter, even for tiny flakes. Did they ever explain why they used the bucket method instead? I feel like you'd lose so much context about where things were actually sitting in the ground.