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That fallen column at Bath House showed me I've been reading strata wrong
Was at the Roman bath ruins near Bath last Tuesday and a chunk of the hypocaust tile wall came down during a tour. Security swept it aside like it was nothing, but I realized I've been treating layers in my own dig as neat sandwiches when collapse events are way messier. Has anyone else had a site failure that forced them to rethink their trench notes?
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spencer6641mo ago
Wait, you actually thought archaeology was neat sandwiches? My last field school had a wall fall that took out three days of paperwork and my favorite trowel handle. The kicker was the stones landed in a perfect line that looked like a legit stratigraphic boundary. I redrew my section three times before I realized I was tracing a collapse, not a floor. That's the thing, ruin events fake the neat layers so well they should be their own unit in the Harris matrix.
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