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That time I spent 4 hours digging at a site before realizing I skipped the ground penetrating radar
Back in 2018, I was helping on a dig near Santa Fe, New Mexico, and we spent a whole afternoon manually trenching a suspected pueblo site based on old survey notes. Turns out, if we had run a GPR unit first, we would have found the main wall line in 20 minutes and saved ourselves the blisters. Now I always push for at least a quick radar pass before breaking ground. Has anyone else had a similar experience skipping modern tools on a dig?
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simonh7426d ago
Ngl, I've had that exact thing happen on a site in Colorado where we dug three test pits before someone finally ran a magnetometer and found the midden was actually 50 feet north. Tbh, it taught me to always spend the first hour on geophysics even if the crew thinks it's a waste of time.
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lucashart16d ago
Gotta push back a little on the timeline though. Running a mag survey usually takes way more than twenty minutes unless the grid is tiny or you're skipping some steps. Setting up the grid lines and actually walking them slow enough to get good data can eat an hour or more. Still beats digging blind for half a day, just want to set the time expectation right.
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allen.charlie25d ago
Tell me about it, nothing like digging in the wrong spot for three hours because nobody wanted to waste twenty minutes on the magnetometer. Bet that guy felt real smart when you found it was fifty feet north.
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