A retired surveyor in Tucson told me to stop trusting the dirt layer map, and he was right

Uma Lopez · 2026-09-20T17:15:04.705569+00:00

I was at a small museum archive in Tucson last spring helping sort a donated collection, and an older guy named Ray who used to do survey work kept watching me pencil in the stratigraphy on a site sketch. He finally leaned over and said the clean dirt lines I was drawing were a story I made up, because water and rodents and later digging all mix those layers together. He walked me through a pit from a site near the Santa Cruz that had three separate occupations jumbled into what looked like a single band of soil. Now I always note disturbance before I note depth, and it has saved me from at least two bad calls on paper. How many of you have caught yourself drawing neat lines over dirt that was never that neat?

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A retired surveyor in Tucson told me to stop trusting the dirt layer map, and he was right | Archaeology Discoveries - HW Forums