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Am I the only one who still measures context instead of just posting the artifact photo?
Last week I was helping sort a box of lithics from a site near Tucson and a volunteer kept photographing each point by itself on a white sheet with no scale. I asked where the grid photo was and she said the nice close-ups were enough for the report. They are not, because without a scale bar and a north arrow the measurements mean nothing and anyone re-checking the find has to guess. Now our lab rule is one context shot per layer plus one scaled close-up, and the write-ups go way faster. Has anyone else had to push back on the pretty photo habit, or is this just my site?
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avery_lopez1mo ago
The part that gets me is how this plays out years later when someone pulls the collection for a thesis or a re-analysis. A pretty photo with no scale is basically a dead end. You cannot go back and re-measure, you cannot compare it to anything, and the object itself might be in storage across the country by then. So the person who took the shortcut is long gone and the next researcher eats the cost. I have started telling students that a photo without a scale is not data, it is just a souvenir. The lab rule you landed on sounds about right, and honestly the time saved on write-ups alone should win over the holdouts.
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