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Stumbled upon my grandad's archaeology field notes from the 70s and the contrast is huge
I was cleaning out my attic last week and found a box of my grandad's old archaeology stuff from the 70s. He used to work on digs in Greece, and his field notes are all handwritten with pencil sketches of pottery shards. Back then, they had to use film cameras and develop photos in a darkroom, which took days. Now, we just use drones and 3D scanners to map entire sites in hours. It's crazy to think how much faster we can find and record things today. But I also miss the hands-on feel of those old methods, where you had to really look at every detail up close. Sometimes, I think we might lose some of that careful observation with all the tech. Still, it's amazing how many new discoveries we're making because of these tools.
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anthonyh387mo ago
Scan those notes before they fade, trust me.
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james_torres7mo ago
My old biology notes have basically turned into ancient cave paintings at this point. You need a team of experts with special lights just to guess what the second half of the carbon cycle was. That coffee stain isn't a stain anymore, it's a active predator that hunts ink for sport. We're not preserving notes, we're running a tiny rescue mission for forgotten facts.
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wendy727mo ago
Anthony's totally right. My old university notes from like ten years back are basically ghosts now. The pencil sketches I did in the margins have completely faded away. A coffee stain on one page ate through the ink, so a whole paragraph is just gone. It's a real shame, I wish I'd taken a picture of them back then. Scanning them while they're still clear is definitely the move.
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