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Warning: picking moisture testing over carbon dating on a dig in Arizona
I had to choose between spending my budget on a good moisture meter or sending samples for carbon dating on a site near Tucson. I picked the moisture meter because the soil was weird and I thought it would save time. Ended up finding a layer of clay that was hiding a storage pit with broken pottery from around 900 AD. The carbon dating would have told me the age but the moisture test showed me where to dig. Got the dates later from a university lab for cheap but the pottery was already out of context. Anyone else skip the fancy tests and just go with ground truth on a site?
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olivere3025d ago
Picked the moisture meter because the soil was weird" is basically the story of my entire field career, just usually ending with me finding a septic tank instead of pottery. I've learned the hard way that fancy lab tests can wait, but a shovel and a good meter will never steer you wrong, even if they sometimes steer you into someone's old garbage pit. Better to find the stuff and have to re-date it than to have a perfect date for a hole you didn't know was there.
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