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Unpopular opinion: I started wet sifting my dig spoil at a site near Tucson and pulled 14 flakes everyone else missed
Our crew was dry screening buckets from a Hohokam pit house unit and finding almost nothing, so one afternoon I ran the leftover dirt through a window screen with water from the truck. A quarter cup of tiny debitage and a broken shell bead showed up in material we would have dumped, and the supervisor now keeps a wash tub on site. It slows us way down though, and screens clog fast in caliche soil, so I only do it for feature fill. Does anyone here wet screen on dry sites, or is that a good way to get kicked off a survey?
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ryan_clark4013d ago
Wet screening feature fill makes sense but doing it everywhere on a dry site is a whole different thing. I've seen crews lose half a day fighting caliche sludge and then the dirt's still stuck in the mesh. Your flake counts are real, but 14 flakes doesn't tell you much if you can't say where in the pit house they came from anyway.
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