Chatted with a field tech from the Çatalhöyük dig last week

He said they found a whole new burial cluster just by re-examining old excavation photos from the 1960s. The stuff was right there in the archives no one looked at for decades. Made me wonder how many other sites have undiscovered features hiding in plain sight in old field notebooks. Has anyone here ever found something major just by going back through old records?

3 comments

3 Comments

james_bell5d ago

Man that dig has so much history hidden in plain sight.

gavin4695d ago

Is it really that deep though? Like, sure, there's some old bricks and maybe a foundation from the 1800s, but that's pretty much every other lot in this part of town. I've seen people get all worked up over a rusted horseshoe and a broken bottle, calling it a "window into the past." Feels like a lot of fuss over what's basically just an old trash pit, you know?

kai_webb915d ago

Yeah I used to roll my eyes at that stuff too until I went on a dig with my uncle who's into genealogy... turns out some of that "trash" actually tied back to a family he'd been researching for years. Changed my whole view on it.