A dig report from 1992 flipped my view on pre-Columbian trade networks

I found a table of obsidian source samples in a dusty PDF from the University of Colorado's field school archive that proved people in the Southwest were trading 500 miles farther than I thought, has anyone else stumbled across old field data that contradicted what you learned in school?

3 comments

3 Comments

brown.susan2mo ago

Are you sure the samples weren't just mixed up in storage by accident?

michael_wood322mo ago

Not a chance, @brown.susan. Those samples were CATALOGUED with timestamps and serial numbers, mixing them up would take a deliberate effort.

kellyj2310d ago

My friend works in a lab and once told me about a time their whole system went DOWN for a week. The computer that tracks all the sample barcodes got a virus and they had to go back to PAPER records. Let me tell you, it was a MESS. People were handwriting labels and some of the writing looked like CHICKEN SCRATCH. By the time the computers came back online, they found two samples that had gotten swapped because someone misread a serial number. It took them THREE days to figure it out. So yeah, accidents DO happen even with fancy cataloging.