I chose to leave a dig site after 4 days in Jordan because the lead archaeologist rushed the trowel work, and I still think I was right | Archaeology Discoveries

Faith Johnson · 2026-09-23T11:05:06.556299+00:00

Everyone on that team told me to stay and just document what I saw, but I packed up and drove back to Amman on a Thursday. The supervisor had us digging through a Byzantine layer with picks because he wanted to hit a mosaic before the grant money ran out, and we were losing pottery context every single hour. I got a lot of grief for walking, but I kept my field notes and photos and later sent them to a professor at Michigan State who agreed the stratigraphy was garbage. Sometimes leaving is the only way to protect the record, even if it makes you the bad guy on the crew. Has anyone else bailed on a dig because of a bad call like that?

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I chose to leave a dig site after 4 days in Jordan because the lead archaeologist rushed the trowel work, and I still think I was right | Archaeology Discoveries - Chatter Central