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Rant: My trowel went through the floor of a 1,200 year old pit in Belize
So I was working a dig near San Ignacio two summers ago and we hit a soft patch that looked like plain old dirt. I pushed my trowel in maybe 2 inches and it punched straight through what turned out to be a thin cap over a burial chamber, and I froze thinking I'd wrecked the whole context. Our field director, a guy named Miguel, told me to stop digging, screen every scrap of that fill, and map the hole before touching anything else. Best move we made, because we pulled 40 something obsidian flakes and a jade bead out of what I almost threw in a bucket. Has anyone else had a trowel go where it should not, and how did you recover the stratigraphy?
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lee.cora1d ago
Kept reading this thinking about how close you came to losing all of it, and honestly the part that sticks with me is Miguel making you screen the fill. That is the whole thing right there. Most people in that moment just want to back out slow and pretend it did not happen, and the fill gets tossed because it looks like nothing. But that soft cap over a chamber is basically a sealed time capsule, and the dirt around it is full of stuff that fell in when the cap was built or broke later. I have seen digs where the excavator scraped a whole lens off the top of a pit and the only reason we know is because somebody noticed tiny charcoal bits in the back dirt. So taking it a step past what you did, the real move is to also bag a column sample of that fill before you even map, because the layers inside the hole tell you the order things happened even when the walls are gone. You can float it later and pull seeds or micro flakes that never show up in a screen. That is how you get the stratigraphy back when the trowel already did its damage.
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