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My field notebook got soaked in a storm at a site near Tucson and I lost 3 weeks of context notes
Last Friday a monsoon came through our dig site outside Tucson faster than the forecast said, and my backpack was sitting right at the edge of the tarp. My Rite in the Rain notebook survived, but the cheap one I use for context sheets turned into mush, so I lost the exact depths and grid refs for about 40 artifacts we pulled that week. Now I photograph every page at the end of each day, but I'm wondering if anyone here has a better backup system for paper records in the field. What do you do when your notes are the only record and they get destroyed?
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the_sean20d ago
The part about losing "exact depths and grid refs" really hits home. I read a blog post from a CRM archaeologist a while back who said she started scanning her context sheets with her phone right in the field, not later at camp, because waiting even a few hours is how stuff gets lost. She used a basic scanning app that turns the photo into a PDF and uploaded it to a shared drive when she got signal back in town. The thing I took from it was that the backup has to happen somewhere other than your pack, otherwise one storm takes out both the paper and the phone.
What I've heard some crews do is get a cheap waterproof case for the phone and treat the daily photo dump as part of closing out the site, same as packing tools. It sounds like a pain but so does redoing three weeks of context.
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