Comparing hand sieving vs water screening at a site near Austin

I was working a small prehistoric site in central Texas last spring and tried two different methods for processing the dirt from our test units. Hand sieving through 1/4 inch mesh was taking forever, like 45 minutes per bucket, and I was missing tiny flakes and bones. Switched to water screening with a 1/8 inch mesh and a hose, and it cut the time to 15 minutes per bucket while catching way more micro-debitage. Has anyone else found that water screening changes what kind of artifacts you pull up?

2 comments

2 Comments

patricia9051mo ago

Hose time sounds like a luxury if you've got good water access and don't mind screening all that silt into the creek. Hand sieving might be slower but it keeps the dirt dry so you can actually spot charcoal flecks and burned rock that water just washes away. Plus those 1/8 inch screens clog something fierce if your soil has any clay in it, which central Texas sure does. Running water through a screen also settles fine organics into a mush that dries into a brick, making sorting later a nightmare. Some sites need that dry context to keep everything readable, no matter how fast you can slosh through buckets.

angela_dixon1mo ago

Yeah, I've been there with the clay soils in central Texas. Hand sieving felt slower at first but it saved me hours of picking through that dried mush later. Kept the charcoal and burned rock intact too, which made reading the site way easier on my end.