Everytime I see clips of these archaeologists dig stuff, I can’t help but wonder how do they know where or when to stomp their shovel into the ground? It seems to me that if you aren’t for certain, your digging could easily damage or break a potentially great discovery.
I’ve seen anything from shovels to excavators and they seem to go pretty hard into the dirt.
So how do they know how much force to hit and make sure they don’t cut or destroy such ancient and delicate items?
In: Earth Science
There are layers in the ground called strata, and we usually know which one we’re looking for.
So if you’re looking for a load of burials, and there are 3 strata, you know that layer 1 is soil, layer 2 is pebbles, and layer 3 is clay. The people lived before the soil, so they lived on layer 2, but they dug the graves deep down so the holes for the people will be in layer 3, so you can remove all the soil and some of the rocks with a digger and then be really careful with the clay layer.
Saying that, on a dig in Spain, the first hit with a pickaxe into the top layer shattered a burial urn, the head archaeologists response was just “that’s what glue is for!”. Once you find the right layer you do everything super slowly. So when I found the edges of a burial hole with my shovel, I dug with a tiny trowel and brush, and every inch or so was photographed and cataloged, so you couldn’t do any damage. All of the dirt that was dug out was inspected and even tiny bone fragments were sorted and kept.
Usually diggers are used to remove all the layers that people have already messed with. Farmland has been plowed to a certain depth, so you know everything up to a certain point has been disturbed anyway.
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