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Just realized my field note habit was ruining my dig records
A few months back I was working a site outside Santa Fe and a volunteer pointed out that my field notes were basically a mess of personal impressions, not actual data. She said something like, "You're writing a diary, not an excavation log." Man, that stung, but she was right. I would jot down stuff like "beautiful pot sherd" instead of the exact depth and grid location. Now I use a set form with checkboxes for every layer, soil color, and artifact count before I add any of my own thoughts. My notebook is way less fun to read, but the crew can actually follow what I found without asking me a hundred questions. Anyone else get called out for sloppy records and have to rebuild their whole system?
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evaallen14d ago
Wait, I have to push back on this a little. Those personal impressions are part of the record too, they just need to be marked separate from the hard data. I got told the same thing once about my notes being too chatty, and I almost threw out the baby with the bathwater. Like, that "beautiful pot sherd" comment, that tells future people about your eye level and what caught your attention, which can matter for understanding the dig process. Now I do the checkboxes first, sure, but I keep a second margin column for impressions with a bracket that says "interpretive." You lose something when you strip all the human out of the excavation log, the crew can follow the numbers but they can't follow your brain that day.
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