Update on that dig site outside Santa Fe, what a difference 3 years makes

I was back at that old Pueblo site near Santa Fe last weekend, the one we worked on back in 2021. Back then we were digging test pits with hand trowels and sifting everything by eye, finding maybe 10 tiny pot sherds a day. Now they've got this drone with a thermal camera that maps out buried walls in 20 minutes. My buddy who runs the dig said they found a whole kiva complex last month just from the drone images. It's wild how fast the tech changed, but I kinda miss the slow pace of just brushing dirt off rocks and wondering what you'd find. Has anyone else here gone back to an old site and felt like it was a totally different place?

3 comments

3 Comments

jake_hall8811d ago

Dude yes. I went back to a site in southern Utah last fall that I helped survey in 2019. Back then we were literally crawling on hands and knees looking for flaking debris. Now they're running ground penetrating radar over the whole place and finding pit houses we walked right past. Found a whole storage cist with corn cobs still in it, missed it by maybe 20 feet three years ago. Kinda makes you feel like you wasted a lot of time, but also it's just cool to see what we couldn't see before.

the_robin11d ago

The part about "finding pit houses we walked right past" really hits me. That whole feeling of wasted time is rough but it also shows how much the field has changed. I remember my first survey in 2015 we were just eyeballing the ground for anything that looked off. Now with magnetometry and LIDAR you can spot features that would have taken us weeks to find before. It makes you wonder how many big sites we missed back in the day that are just sitting there waiting for the right tech to find them.

wells.brooke11d ago

Oh man, have you had that moment where you realize you were basically walking over stuff that was right under your feet the whole time? I went back to a site in Chaco Canyon country last spring, one I'd worked on back in 2018, and we found three whole rooms just from a drone flight that took fifteen minutes. It stung a little, not gonna lie. We spent like two months there hand-excavating one tiny room block, and now the tech just shows you everything like it's no big deal. But there's something special about the old way too, you know? Like you really earned every little sherd you found.