Finding the Past
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A nice article on American archaeology:Nick McComas ran his gloved hand across the dirt, sifting soil through wire mesh, looking and feeling for what stayed behind. A rock, a root, then something white — a chip off a plate no one's used for 100 years.
"If you find one thing, one little thing, that's the hook," Kat Ward said.
http://www.archaeologynews.org/story.asp?ID=276846&Title=Clues%20to%20the%20pastI used to look around the back yards of the homes I grew up in looking for arrow heads (or, far less likely, dinosaur bones). I found "surface finds" — chips of colorful china designs, a clay marble, part of a sports trophy. Surface finds are actually a clue that a place might be worth test pit — and that, as the article says, determines if a place is worth a formal, large-scale, gridded dig. My early homes were built on places with centuries of habitation (including Native American — little of America isn't) but I doubt any of them was worth a full-scale dig.
-Kushana
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