> Since 2004, Dr. Hublin and his colleagues have been working through layers of rocks on a desert hillside at Jebel Irhoud.
I have so much respect for archeologists. Spending over a decade in one spot, literally on hands and knees, digging and meticulously sifting through anything that is found, is to me the epitome of dedication to a craft.
But another part of me thinks: there must be a better way!
I know that expeditions often hire bands of locals to help them dig and sift. But does anybody know, have there ever been any advances in this field to make the process go faster, or require less human toiling?
Non-invasive technologies are super-cool because we may not actually want to disturb stuff until we have the technology to do it properly. Some stuff we may never want to disturb for cultural or other reasons.
Just stressing the "other reasons" part. In some countries people actually advocate for leaving stuff like this buried for fear of corrupt gov. officials handing off what they find to smugglers.
Small observation: I worked on a dinosaur dig in Montana for 2 summers as a teen. a major problem was not identification of the bones in our case, but the fragility of the bones we were digging. Maybe 50% of our time was flaking rock away slowly with a an icepick, sweeping up the crushed rock, putting it in a bucket, and moving the crushed rock to a tailings pile. Each dedicated quadrant of the dig had its own tailings pile (1x1x1M of rock had its own pile) in case a pice of fragment was lost.
I know that low cost survey Lidar will really help, and that RTK GPS is also improving things. On larger digs, documentation with drones is also likely to produce better incremental tracking of progress. But, for this to be better, improving the actual digging is still a big unsolved problem.
EDIT: the other 50% of our time was:
40% reassembling bones with superglue in an air conditioned room. (pleasant for the temperature, but maddeningly frustrating work)
10% dig notation, journaling, discussion, planning, survey, etc.
I have so much respect for archeologists. Spending over a decade in one spot, literally on hands and knees, digging and meticulously sifting through anything that is found, is to me the epitome of dedication to a craft.
But another part of me thinks: there must be a better way!
I know that expeditions often hire bands of locals to help them dig and sift. But does anybody know, have there ever been any advances in this field to make the process go faster, or require less human toiling?