Hello everybody, I hope you all had a great holiday season! I spent the holidays working on a new article for StoneAgeMan, which is now online. It’s about how archaeologists excavate sites.
Anyone can read about archaeological excavations in a textbook, so I made my latest article more personal than a standard “how-to” piece. While I do include information from textbooks, I spend a lot of the article describing my personal excavation experiences. I also did this because no two excavations are the same, making it impossible to describe what happens on all archaeological digs.
However, most excavations share some common features. The first is that much of the “digging” is careful and methodical, because the worst thing an archaeologist can do is accidentally destroy a feature or artifact before it’s been properly documented.
Speaking of which, documentation is another key element on all archaeological digs. When you excavate a site, you destroy its context (e.g. the position of artifacts in relation to each other, and the different layers of soil), and the context of a site is vital for learning about it. Thus, you must generate detailed records during all excavations, to help preserve a site’s context.
There’s far more information in the original article!
Once you’ve read my article, why not browse more of Rob’s new site? There’s a lot of cool content on StoneAgeMan, including information about plants, bushcraft, trips, and more.
Lastly, don’t forget to check out Rob’s YouTube channel for great videos about science, nature, and survival! Here’s a recent video he made about knots, which are way more fascinating than many people realize:
The Jaguar 