Hit 50 soil samples in one dig season. Did not expect that.

Just finished a field school in New Mexico. We were supposed to do 20 flotation samples total. Ended up with 50 because we kept finding burned种子 in weird spots. Lab work is gonna take all winter. Anyone else end up with way more samples than planned?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_kelly1mo ago

Wait, are you sure that's actually a problem? I mean, flotation samples aren't exactly hard to process. You just dump them in water and watch the stuff float up. Fifty samples really isn't that many for a whole field season. I've seen people do that in a couple weeks without any trouble. Unless you found something super rare, I'd say you're fine. What kind of burned seeds are we talking about here anyway?

barbara3991mo ago

Then how much experience do you actually have processing archaeobotanical samples? Because fifty samples might not seem like a lot to you, but the time they take really depends on what's inside them and how careful you want to be with the light fraction. You can't just dump them in water and call it done if you're trying to recover tiny seeds or fragments that are easy to miss. That comment about watching stuff float up worries me a little, honestly. Most of the useful material is in the heavy fraction, the stuff that sinks, and that part takes way more patience and a fine mesh sieve to get right. So what kind of mesh size are you using for your flotation?