Tried wet sieving like the pros for a change and got way more tiny bone fragments than I expected

Last weekend I decided to wet sieve a bucket of dirt from a shell midden site near Tampa instead of just dry screening it like I always do. I ended up pulling out like 40 tiny fish vertebrae and a few rodent teeth that would've totally slipped through my 1/4 inch screen. The process took forever and my back is still sore from hauling water, but I'm kinda hooked now. Has anyone else switched methods and suddenly found way more microfauna than you thought was there?

2 comments

2 Comments

sullivan.abby15d agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, that's a game changer for sure... but has anyone thought about what all those tiny bones mean for the paleoenvironment? Like finding rodent teeth in a shell midden, that could tell us if the site was used year round or just seasonally. Might be worth passing a sample to a zooarchaeologist if you're really curious.

piper_flores6915d ago

My first time wet sieving was at a site near Cedar Key and I pulled 15 tiny fish otoliths from just one bucket of shell midden soil. I honestly used to think dry screening was good enough for everything but that day totally changed my mind. The amount of microfauna hiding in plain sight is INSANE once you actually do it right. I tried it on a hunch and now I wont go back to dry screening for anything smaller than 1/4 inch. It does wreck your lower back though no joke.