Why Do Archaeologists Dig Square Holes?
Take a quick look across the Hickory Bluff site and you’ll see lots of little orange flags marking spots on the ground, and a series of square holes with string around the edges. It looks like an archaeological site. So, why do archaeologists always dig square-sided holes? Well, it’s mainly so that they’ll know where they are. Space is a key idea in archaeology. Where something is found is as important as what it is or how old it is. The location of an artifact within a site tells us its association, what it was related to, what it goes with. It’s like a puzzle, we have to figure out what pieces go together before we can start to assemble them. For example, if we find charcoal from a campfire or hearth that has a radiocarbon date of 1000 B.C., we want to know whether other artifacts found near the fire were from the same period or whether they were left by people who used the site much later. Or we may find pottery fragments and stone tools in another part of the site. If we know from
