Chat with a local elder made me rethink how we treat dig sites

I was at a dig near Taos, New Mexico, and got talking with a man from the local community. He asked me, 'What do you do with the dirt after you sift it?' I gave my standard answer about backfilling trenches. He just shook his head and said, 'That dirt holds stories too. You move it, you lose them.' It hit me that in our focus on artifacts, we treat the soil matrix as just waste to be put back. But he was right, the exact placement of every grain tells a story about how people lived. We're so trained to look for objects we miss the context itself. Now I'm worried we're teaching students to value finds over the ground they come from. Has anyone else had a moment that changed how they see basic field methods?

2 comments

2 Comments

phoenix8451mo agoMost Upvoted

Had a similar talk with a farmer's kid on a site in Nebraska. We started having students draw and photo the soil layers in their unit walls before we even let them touch a trowel. Makes them slow down and actually see the color changes and root stains as part of the record, not just stuff in the way of a point. It's a small fix but it changes their first question from "what did you find" to "what did you see." The dirt is the first artifact.

wrenh791mo ago

Isn't this like how we often miss the forest for the trees in life, just like @phoenix845's students learned?