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Why does nobody talk about finding the original ground surface before you dig?
Three years ago I was helping out on a dig outside of Flagstaff, just a small survey project through a local college. We were maybe two weeks in and I kept watching this grad student, Dana, spend what felt like forever scraping at a little patch of dirt with a trowel while the rest of us were moving units and bagging stuff. I honestly thought she was wasting time.
Then our supervisor comes over and Dana points at this thin dark band in the wall of the unit. She said something like, "If we don't stop at this line, we're going to blow right through the floor of the pit house and never know it was there." Turns out that dark band was the old living surface. Like 900 years old. We ended up finding a fire pit and three whole pots sitting right under that spot.
I'd been on maybe four other digs before that and nobody had ever explained it to me that clearly. Everyone always talks about the cool artifacts but nobody talks about reading the dirt itself.
So I guess my question is, how do you all figure out where the original surface is when the soil doesn't have an obvious color change? Any tricks you use, or is it just hours of trowel work and hoping?
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