PSA: I Stopped Trusting Stratigraphy Charts After A Dig At A Roman Villa In Bath

Cole Wright · 2026-10-01T11:30:03.520851+00:00

I used to treat those textbook layer diagrams like gospel. You know the ones, darker soil on top means newer stuff, dig down and you go back in time. Then two seasons ago I volunteered on a Roman villa site outside Bath in Somerset and got humbled fast. We hit a patch where a medieval rubbish pit had been dug clean through three earlier layers, so the "younger" pottery was sitting below stuff from 200 years earlier. The site director, a woman named Priya who has run digs for 15 years, told me flat out that reading layers without reading the cuts is how you end up writing garbage. She made me redo my whole context sheet and mark every intrusion before I recorded a single find. Since then I spend way more time on section drawings and soil color changes than on the artifact list. Anyone else here had a supervisor push back on how they read a trench, and what did you change after?

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PSA: I Stopped Trusting Stratigraphy Charts After A Dig At A Roman Villa In Bath | Archaeology Discoveries - HW Forums