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Everyone's obsessed with that new Roman mosaic find, but I think the site was rushed
I was part of a team near Pompeii last fall, working a dig about 200 meters from the main tourist path. The lead archaeologist pushed us to clear a 10x10 meter section in just three days because a documentary crew was arriving. We uncovered a mosaic floor, but in the hurry, we missed a layer of carbonized wood fragments right beneath it that could have dated the whole villa complex more precisely. Now the published paper just calls it 'late Republican' with a 150-year date range, which is basically useless. I argued we should have taken another week to properly section the area, but the pressure for a 'clean' find won. Has anyone else had to push back against a timeline that sacrificed real data for a good photo op?
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ivanbell1mo ago
Did the documentary crew get footage of the actual dig, or just the cleaned-up mosaic?
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the_thomas3mo ago
Seriously? Getting that mosaic recorded and saved beats a perfect date range any day. You got the main find, which is what matters.
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cole5493mo ago
Spot on, @the_thomas. See this all the time where people fixate on one small flaw and miss the whole win. Honestly, it's better to have the thing saved and shared than to get hung up on perfect details nobody will remember.
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