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LiDAR is neat, but a trowel and 40 hours in the dirt still beats it for finding small stuff
Everyone in my archaeology group chat keeps going on about LiDAR and satellite scans like they're the only tools that matter now. Last summer I worked a site outside Flagstaff where the scan showed nothing special, just a flat field. We dug test pits anyway and pulled up 47 flakes, a broken point, and a fire cracked rock cluster about 30 cm down. The scan missed all of it because the stuff was too small and buried. A grad student I know spent a whole season on a LiDAR survey in New Mexico and found one big plaza, which is great, but he had zero small finds to date the site with. I'm not saying the tech is bad. I'm saying people treat it like a shortcut and skip the slow work, then wonder why their report is thin. Give me a shovel, a screen, and time over a fancy map any day. Anyone here actually had a scan lead you to something the shovel would have missed?
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