Leaving the Pieces In Place

Leaving the Pieces In Place. . An untouched archaeology site is rich with potential discoveries. Even a broken piece of ancient pottery, called a potsherd, can provide clues about the past. For example, archaeologists often use painted pottery sherds on the ground surface to estimate the age of a site. Unfortunately, sometimes visitors are unaware of the importance of leaving all artifacts in their place. As tempting as they may be to pick up, collecting potsherds makes the dating of an archaeology site difficult, less accurate, or impossible., Scientific excavation is essentially the controlled and documented destruction of an archaeological feature. Once soil, rock, and artifacts have been removed from the earth, we cannot put them back in exactly the same way. Out of respect for the people who used to live here and their descendants, we have left many sites unexcavated., Did You Know? , Researchers can examine pottery sherds on the ground surface of an undisturbed site and date the place to within 25 years of its use., Captions , (Photo #1) Turkey Pen Pueblo at Cedar Mesa. Courtesy of BLM Utah. 1978. , Removal of artifacts and disturbing the layers of earth in which they are buried results in the destruction and disappearance of pieces of our shared human history. Artifacts have been removed from Turkey Pen Pueblo for over 130 years. As a result, we can no longer use artifacts on the surface of the site to reliably tell the story of the people who lived there. , (Photo #2) Archaeologist, Jonathan Till, studies pottery fragments near Bullet Canyon on Cedar Mesa. 2018. , The dark grey dirt indicates that these potsherds were part of a "midden," an intentional deposit of pottery fragments, stone flakes, hearth ash, and charcoal. Because the artifacts were left undisturbed, we can assess when the site was occupied, how the site functioned, and what kinds of long-distance relationships the site occupants had with other communities.