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A grad student at a dig in Cortez shut down my whole 'context is king' speech and I'm still thinking about it
Two summers back I was volunteering on a Puebloan site near Cortez, Colorado, and I got into it with a PhD student about screening dirt. I said the real info lives in the stratigraphy and the screen just catches stuff the trowel misses, which is the line I'd been repeating since my undergrad field school. She pulled me over to her unit and showed me a tiny turquoise bead that only turned up because they wet screened everything, and it sat in a layer that was already disturbed by a rodent burrow. So the broken context was the find, in a way, since it told them the bead had moved after the fact. Anyone else had a moment where a wet screen or a flotation sample beat what the wall profile was telling you?
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the_mary8d ago
The part about "the broken context was the find" is close to right but not quite how most of us were taught to say it. Disturbed context does not stop being context, it just changes the question you can ask. A bead in a rodent burrow still tells you something, like the fact that it was there at all and got moved, but you have to be careful not to treat the burrow as the story when the bead is the actual thing you care about. The real lesson from that unit is that no single method carries the day, stratigraphy and screening and flotation all catch different things and you need all of them. Saying the screen beat the wall profile is really just saying you had two lines of evidence and one of them got lucky.
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