My professor told me field notes were useless for dig reports. He was dead wrong.

Back in 2019 at the Monte Alban site in Oaxaca, my archaeology professor said to just take quick mental notes and skip the notebook. I followed his advice for two weeks and my final report got flagged for missing context on Stratum 4. Now I spend 30 minutes each day writing everything down in a Rite in the Rain book. Has anyone else had a supervisor give them bad advice that set them back?

3 comments

3 Comments

robins831mo ago

Fair point @the_mary, but is bad field notes really the end of the world?

holly_reed551mo ago

the_mary makes a good point about the photo thing. That "take photos and label them later" mindset is almost worse than no notes because it gives you a false sense of security. I wasted a whole summer after a dig in Colorado where my supervisor swore by that method. Ended up with a thousand photos of dirt and no way to tell which pit or depth any of them came from. The labels got mixed up and the metadata was useless. Field notes force you to process what you're seeing in real time, you can't just snap and move on. That moment of writing down the color change or the charcoal flecks is what makes the difference between a solid report and a guessing game. Monty Albans a complex site too, multiple phases of occupation. Your prof was just wrong period.

the_mary1mo ago

Start by telling me what your professor actually thought field notes lacked that made them "useless" to him. Was he one of those old school guys who thinks memory is bulletproof or did he just hate the physical act of writing stuff down? Because that makes a huge difference in whether he was just lazy or genuinely misguided. Either way, it's wild to me that someone teaching at a major site like Monte Alban would actively tell students to skip documentation. My first dig supervisor told me to "just take photos and label them later" which sounds fine until you realize you have no idea what layer anything came from three weeks later.