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PSA: Old school sieve trick saved my dig last month
I was out on a survey near Flagstaff last month and we kept hitting this layer of charcoal and bone fragments that was impossible to separate from the dirt screens. The fine mesh we brought kept clogging up with wet clay after a rain storm hit us on day two. I remembered my grandad telling me about using a metal kitchen colander as a pre-sieve before the main screen. Grabbed one from the camp supply box for like 3 bucks, layered it over our standard quarter inch mesh, and it caught all the big rocks and roots before they hit the fine screen. Cut our processing time by almost half for the rest of the week. Has anyone else used random kitchen gear on a site or am I the only one who forgot their proper tools?
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harris.vera19d ago
...and honestly, I bet half the people on here have used a kitchen colander on site at least once, they just don't admit it! My big question is: did you wash that colander before you used it again for food, or is it permanently a field tool now? Because I made that mistake once and my pasta tasted like ancient dirt for a week. Also, how thick was the charcoal layer you were hitting? Was it like a defined lens or just scattered throughout the clay? That makes a huge difference in whether a pre-sieve even helps or if you're better off just picking the bigger stuff out by hand. Flagstaff has some weird soil, I've had my own battles with it.
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the_mia19d ago
Got a buddy who swears by using an old spaghetti strainer for sorting tiny seeds from sediment in the lab. Tried it myself once and ended up with more pasta sauce on my samples than actual results. Still, the colander trick is solid for field work, just spring for a dedicated one unless you want your chili to taste like a paleo site.
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harper_owens19d ago
My buddy Kyle tried this once with an old pasta strainer in the lab and ended up getting a bunch of tomato seeds stuck in his sample from a previous batch. He said it looked like someone dumped a salad on his soil. He washed it REAL good after that first disaster but then his chili tasted like clay for like three meals. Now he keeps a separate colander just for field work and swears by it for sifting out charcoal bits from the sandy layer. Last I heard he found a perfect one at a garage sale for fifty cents and calls it his paleo pasta maker.
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