Just a short time working on a large dig made me appreciate the smaller digs I’d worked on before.  The giant dirt screen plants were great in that they did a lot of the heavy lifting for us in a fraction of the time it would have taken humans, but it also meant we had to spend a lot of time basically sitting on our hands.  At least on the smaller digs I always felt like I was doing something, whether it was sifting through all the materials with a little handheld screen.

One day though, just as the grad student promised, a bunch of the workers didn’t show up, and instead of just standing or sitting around with our clipboards taking notes, we had to help with the machines.  I did a lot of landscaping work when I was in high school, so cleaning out the machines and putting them back together was not a big deal for me, but archeologists aren’t generally known for their love of manual labor, so it was kind of fun watching some of the other guys pitch in, especially on the larger dirt screening plants.  However, it was annoying that nobody at the topsoil screener I was working on really knew what they were doing, or seemed very interested in actually doing the work for that matter.

Technorati Tags: dirt screening plants, machines, topsoil screener

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