That week in July when everything went wrong at the Monte Verde dig site

I was down in southern Chile helping with some analysis last July and we hit a disaster. A sudden rainstorm flooded three of our test pits and washed away a layer of preserved organic material we had spent six weeks uncovering. We lost over 40 samples of ancient wood and plant matter that were key to dating the human settlement there. Has anyone else dealt with losing irreplaceable finds to weather like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

logan6581mo ago

Hold on though, @margaretramirez, maybe this whole thing is being blown out of proportion. Rain happens, sites get wet, and if six weeks of work could be undone by one storm then maybe the setup was wrong from the start. Digs in rainy areas need proper drainage or tarps, not hoping the weather will cooperate. Losing 40 samples hurts but it also means those samples might have been sitting too shallow anyway, so their dating was probably already compromised by surface contamination. Sometimes a flood just saves you from publishing bad data later.

kaigibson1mo ago

My buddy lost half his field season in New Mexico back in 2015. Same deal, a big rain. Except he got a call from a rancher a week later. The guy found his trowel and some bone fragments in a wash two miles downstream. Weirdest part was the bone was from a different layer than what he was digging. So yeah, @margaretramirez, sometimes stuff survives but mixed up. Logan's got a point about drainage though. My friend now digs with a tarp system and French drains. Costs time upfront but saves the headache.

margaretramirez1mo ago

Oh no, that is absolutely brutal. A whole six weeks of careful work just washed down the trench like that. I remember hearing from a colleague who lost an intact pot to a flash flood in the desert - it feels like the site itself is fighting back. Have you been able to get back in and see if any of the organic material survived downstream?