Kent
An archaeological site is a book that can only be read once. If you only glance at a few words per page as the pages are destroyed, the text is lost.
If someone takes the interesting artifacts without doing a careful study of relative locations of EVERYTHING, including soil layers, bone fragments, any metallic objects, pottery fragments, knapping detritus, fire-cracked rock, etc. then most of the context is lost and very little can be learned about the people who occupied the site.
Kent
I completely agree. The archeological value drops to near zero in most cases. I am not one to walk out to a site and start digging. By the same token, if I am in a 20 foot cut / fill area context is destroyed already. Leaving a point to be pulverized in the road bed seems a bit extreme...
Kent
> An archaeological site is a book that can only be read once. If you only glance at a few words per page as the pages are destroyed, the text is lost.
The key word there is "site". If you want to count every lithic scatter ever left by Texas Indians as a "site", then pretty much all of Central Texas is a "site". In Texas archaeology, the real sites are those with stratified deposits from different occupations which make dating possible. These are the burned rock middens and the floors in rock shelters.
Kent
You are right. What triggered my response was "Many came from actual mounds containing burial artifacts."
Kent
> You are right. What triggered my response was "Many came from actual mounds containing burial artifacts."
Yes, a good rule of thumb is "if you're digging for artifacts, you're disturbing a site that should be left to the archaeologists to investigate". Even the archaeologists don't typically excavate an entire site (unless it is about to be destroyed), but leave parts of it undisturbed for future archaeologists who may have even better technology and be looking for evidence that presently isn't collected.
For example, one amazing discovery of relatively recent date is that many ancient stone artifacts still bear identifiable traces of the proteins of the plants and animals that the artifact had been in contact with even millenia before. Previously, standard protocol had been to wash the stone artifact, thereby removing that tract evidence.
Andy
That wouldn't have been Grady Singletary would it? 🙂
Kent
Cool collection, Randy!
I recall our fields being plowed up and always being able to go out and find arrowheads too. The farm is in southern Kane County, Illinois, on the Big Rock Creek. To this day, a great place to hunt from where the fields are now, down along the creek and back up to what was surely native prairie grass on either side of the tree line.
That's a shark tooth, isn't it?