21
Hot take: most amateur digs are just destroying context for social media likes
I read a post by an archaeologist from the University of New Mexico last week who said that every year, hobbyists with metal detectors dig up 50% more artifacts than professionals record. She called it 'the great unrecorded erasure.' That really stuck with me. I get that people are excited about finding arrowheads or old buttons, but they pull things out without noting the soil layer or GPS coordinates. That artifact becomes a trinket, not data. A single button in a post hole from 1830 tells you more than a dozen buttons in a shoebox. Has anyone here ever gone back to a known site to try filling in the gaps after a hobbyist dug through it?
2 comments