Document, Document, Document

Sometimes people imagine that all archaeologists do is dig, fight off snakes, and chase down looters. While those might be aspects of our archaeological work, the most important part of our work in the field is documentation. Without documentation the artifacts, ecofacts, and other data we encounter are rendered almost useless. The context and provenience of what we excavate allow us to reconstruct the stories of the past.

So what to document in our excavations? Typically we document by drawing maps of the excavation in plan view (bird's eye view) and profile view (cross-section).  We record information about the ridges and furrows (height, spacing, direction), we record how deep we are below the ground surface, and even differences in color along the ground surface. Since colors are often subjective, cultural influenced, and names not agreed upon, we utilize a system of standardization by using a Munsell Soil Chart. This book contains a variety of colors (each given names - e.g. 10 YR 3/5) that we compare our soils to for a color description.  We wet the soil or sediment (note that dirt is not a scientific term and soil and sediments are not the same) and then compare these to the color swatches in the book.  It can be frustrating to decide which color you have,  but this system provides a way to standardize our observations of color.

The moral of this archaeological tale... DOCUMENT, DOCUMENT, DOCUMENT.  Our job is to record as much data as possible when we excavate. The archaeolgoical record is a non-renewable resources, so once we have dug it up we cannot go back and re-excavate. We get one shot to do this right and that responsiblity weighs heavy at Ceren, where we have a very special data set to record each day.