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Hot take: the guy who showed me how to wet screen dirt at a dig in Tucson ruined dry sifting for me forever
Two summers ago I was volunteering on a dig outside Tucson and I was dry sifting buckets as fast as I could, feeling pretty good about my pace. Then this retired guy named Walt watching me pulled one bucket aside and said, "You're throwing away the small stuff and the small stuff is the story." He had me dump my screen into a bucket of water and swirl it, and what settled at the bottom was a tiny bead and three flakes I never would have caught dry. I sat there kind of stunned because I'd been doing it the fast way for two whole weeks. Now every time I hit a feature layer I slow way down and wet screen it, even when the crew lead is watching the clock. Curious if anyone else here has had a field method totally changed by one person, and what they said that did it?
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fiona_lewis3727d ago
Man, wet screening everything is how you burn a whole day on one unit and get nothing done. Walt was right about the bead but he was working with your time, not his, and I've watched crews lose entire afternoons to slop water through screens when a feature needed to come down before weather hit. Dry sifting catches maybe 90 percent of what's there anyway, and the missing 10 percent is often stuff you can't date or map in a meaningful way. There's a reason the fast way exists, it's not laziness, it's triage.
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