Loading…
5
Went from digging shovel test pits by hand to sifting with a 1/4 inch screen, and my artifact counts tripled in one weekend
For years I just dug test pits and eyeballed the dirt as it came out, which meant I was probably tossing tons of tiny flakes and beads without knowing it. Last month at a site near Wichita I switched to dry sifting everything through a 1/4 inch mesh screen after a grad student told me her crew pulls 3 times the lithic debitage that way. My first full day with the screen turned up 214 flakes from a single unit, mostly microdebitage I would have missed completely. Curious if anyone here screens with a smaller mesh than that, or if 1/4 inch is kind of the standard everyone lands on.
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
shah.ben15d ago
Isnt this just the same lesson as the mechanic who actually puts your car on a lift versus the one who just peeks under the hood? In my experience, the tool that slows you down and makes you look closer almost always finds more than the fast eyeball pass. I see it in cooking too, where a cheap kitchen scale beats guessing at flour by the handful every single time. Same with my grandpa panning for gold, he never trusted his eyes, he ran everything through a classifier first. So yeah, 1/4 inch might be the common landing spot, but the real win was you slowing down, not the mesh size itself. Your mileage may vary, but I bet if you went to 1/8 inch you would find yet another pile of stuff you missed.
6