Heads up: Modern trash in layers can wreck your context

I mean, we found a plastic bit and had to redo our layer work. Now I always scan for modern stuff early.

3 comments

3 Comments

Last year at the creek site, I thought modern mix-ins were no big deal... We hit a piece of broken glass and it threw off our whole sequence. That one find made me a believer in early scans now.

the_emma1mo ago

Back in 2021 at the old farm site, I figured a few soda cans wouldn't hurt our dating. Then we pulled a modern coin from what we thought was a colonial layer, and it wasted a whole week of work. That coin made me question every assumption I had about site integrity. Now I'm all for those early scans, because why risk your timeline on someone's lost pocket change?

juliah941mo ago

Yikes, that coin story hits home! I had a similar mess with a plastic toy in what we thought was a Viking layer. @terryf42, your glass piece sounds just as annoying. How do you handle the extra time and cost for those early scans? Do you scan every single spot now, or only when something feels off? What's the one object that finally made you stop taking chances?