The DigQuest cast
Each friend shows you one idea by how they act. Meet them all and see how the ideas fit together.
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Layer Stratigraphic context — where in the layered earth? (vertical chronology, context integrity) -
Shape Artifact-typological analysis — what family of object? (comparative typology, craft traditions) -
Past Dating techniques — when by which method? (dates as ranges with confidence intervals) -
Keep Cultural-context inference — keep-what-people-said, not invent-what-they-must-have-meant -
Ask Community-partnership ethics — whose story is this and who gets to tell it? (NAGPRA + UNDRIP-grounded, descendant-community partnership) -
Grit Conservation — keep it, don't fix it; a fragile find is stabilized gently, never scrubbed shiny or restored into something it never was -
Join Reconstruction — fit the pieces you have, never invent the ones you don't; a rebuilt pot shows its gaps honestly -
Sherd The ordinary object — the broken cooking pot tells you more than the gold crown; how people lived is written in humble everyday things -
Spare Leave it — you don't dig everything; some of the site stays untouched for future diggers, and some because the people it belongs to want it left -
Void Absence — what isn't there can mean three things; never read a gap as a fact too quickly