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Vent: my trench shovel beats the fancy trowel every single time and I'm tired of pretending otherwise
I've been digging at a site outside Flagstaff for the past 6 weeks and started out doing everything by the book with a 4 inch pointing trowel, scraping and brushing every little layer like they taught me in field school. After 3 weeks my wrist was wrecked and I was averaging maybe half a unit a day, which is embarrassing when the sun is beating down at 95 degrees. Then an older guy on the crew named Dale handed me his beat up trench shovel and said just peel the layers off in thin sheets and switch to the trowel when you hit something worth keeping. I did it for one afternoon and cleared a whole 1x1 meter unit, and still caught the rim of a painted bowl before I nicked it. The trowel people keep saying shovels destroy context but honestly the shovel let me see the soil changes way faster, and I stopped missing features because I could expose more of the floor at once. Has anyone else made this switch, or am I about to get roasted by my old field school TA?
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viola_patel724d ago
Dale's right. Peeling thin sheets at 95 degrees saved my wrist too.
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