The 1987 map at my local museum had a clear error, found it while scanning field notes

I volunteer at the small history museum in Flagstaff on weekends, digitizing old survey records. Last Tuesday I pulled out a 1987 archaeological site map for the area out near Sunset Crater. It showed a granary ruin about 2 miles north of where my GPS and the original 1970s field notes said it should be. Turns out someone in the 80s transposed two numbers on the grid correction, and every later report just copied that wrong spot. Has anyone else caught a similar mistake in older published maps and had to tell the lead archaeologist about it?

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phoenix_adams605d ago

...and here's the thing nobody talks about, once that wrong coordinate gets into a published map, it becomes the official truth. Every grad student, every contractor doing a Section 106 survey, they all just pull from that map without checking the original field notes. So that error didn't just stay on one piece of paper, it probably got baked into a dozen site forms, maybe even the state's database. You might want to check if the error made it into AZSITE or whatever registry they use now, because that's way harder to fix than just annotating a museum copy. Good catch on your part though, most people would've just assumed the old notes were the sloppy ones.