Spent 3 weeks digging a trench that turned out to be a modern drainage line
I volunteered on a survey near Tucson back in March and we hit this dark soil stain that everyone got excited about. The lead said it looked like a midden, so I spent about 19 days troweling it out in 10 cm levels, bagging every speck of charcoal and pottery. Turned out the pottery was all 1930s orange glaze stuff from a ranch house, and the stain was just a drain trench some farmer cut through the site. The real lesson was to check for discarded modern junk and ask if there's a property map before digging, which took me 20 minutes once I finally did it. The lead admitted after the fact that she had seen a map with the drainage marked and forgot. Has anyone else gotten burned by a modern feature that looked crazy old at first glance?