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Got roasted on a dig forum for calling every burnt rock a hearth, changed how I read fire cracked rock
About 4 months ago I posted pics from a site near Abilene and called a cluster of burnt chert a hearth. A commenter with 20+ years in the field said flat out that thermal alteration alone doesn't prove a fire feature, and pointed me toward soil color and charcoal recovery instead. I was pretty annoyed at first (classic, right?) but I went back through my field notes and realized I had no rubified sediment data for half those spots. Now I log Munsell color on every hearth candidate before I even bag the rock, and 3 of my old "hearths" turned out to be just a burned tree stump. Curious if anyone else here changed their feature ID method after getting called out by a stranger online.
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felix_black8d ago
Did you ever go back and check the tree stump spots for actual charcoal fragments or just the color change? Here's the thing nobody talks about, burnt stumps can leave a root pattern that looks a lot like a shallow basin hearth if you're only looking at the rock scatter. I started mapping where the FCR sits in plan view before I dig anything, because a real hearth usually has that tight clustered ring or oval, while a stump burn spreads out along old roots. Took me way too long to figure that out and I had two sites where the burned rock was just sitting on top of a natural chert lens that happened to get cooked by a grass fire. Soil color gets you part of the way there, but the shape of the scatter in plan view is what finally cleaned up my feature log.
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