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Got into it with a guy at the dig site near Tucson last summer
We were clearing a new trench and he kept tossing pottery shards into the general finds bucket without marking their location. I told him we needed the grid square for context, and he just said 'it's all dirt from the same hole, who cares?' Had to stop everything and re-sift three buckets of soil. Does anyone else have to deal with people who don't get why provenience matters?
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the_derek2d ago
Honestly, sometimes you guys make a religion out of paperwork. If the shards are from the same trench and the same layer, the exact square foot rarely changes the big picture. You probably wasted more science time resifting than you gained in data.
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drew_bennett242d ago
Making a religion out of paperwork," huh the_derek? Tell that to the grad student who has to write the report. That "exact square foot" is the difference between calling it a trash pit and a ceremonial offering. Dude was basically mixing up the pieces of two different puzzles.
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joseph_ellis852d ago
That grad student's whole thesis might hang on calling it a trash pit instead of an offering. The paperwork is the only thing stopping someone from declaring every hole in the ground a sacred site. I've seen people build a whole career on less data than what gets brushed off as a paperwork religion. Let Derek try to publish without the exact grid number and see how that goes.
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