The way excavation photos used to look vs today is wild

I was flipping through some old field reports from a dig in Turkey back in 2005 and the photos looked like someone took them with a potato. Grainy, weird angles, half the trench was in shadow. Fast forward to last summer when I was on a site in New Mexico and the project director was using a drone and a DSLR to document every layer as we went. The difference in detail is crazy. I think the big change was around 2012 when affordable digital cameras got good enough for field work and then drones came in around 2015. Now you can actually see tiny changes in soil color that would have been missed back then. Has anyone else noticed older excavation reports just feel like they're missing half the info because of the photo quality?

2 comments

2 Comments

phoenix_campbell881mo agoMost Upvoted

2003 field work in Honduras with a film camera taught me more about soil stratigraphy than any drone shot ever could because you had to be deliberate about every single frame you took. Honestly sometimes that crappy resolution forced you to sketch and take notes way more carefully, which I bet a lot of researchers skip now because they think the photo will catch everything. I've seen digital reports from 2020 where people just dump 500 drone images into a folder without any labels or context, and that's way less useful than a few well-composed potato shots with handwritten notes. High definition doesn't automatically mean high quality documentation.

alice2421mo ago

That "potato" comparison is spot on, and it's funny how we just accept the low quality back then because that's all we had. It reminds me of how grainy old family photos vs crisp phone pics now tell such a different story - we're basically upgrading our whole memory bank one pixel at a time.