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Watcher at a dig site in Arizona told me my trowel scratches were ruining the whole square
Two summers ago I joined a volunteer dig at a pueblo site outside Flagstaff. First day I'm scraping dirt with my trowel like I've seen on TV, feeling pretty good about myself. Then this retired schoolteacher who's been digging there for 11 years leans over and says, real quiet, 'Honey, you're carving a turkey, not uncovering a floor.' Turns out my angled trowel strokes were slicing right through the stratigraphy, so nobody could tell what layer anything came from. The site lead had to re-photograph the whole 2x2 meter square, which took the crew about 3 extra days. I got moved to screening dirt through a quarter inch mesh for the rest of the week. Still the best lesson I ever got, because now I scrape flat and shallow with the trowel almost parallel to the ground. Anyone else get politely roasted by a volunteer who knows way more than you do?
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abbyr9615d ago
I used to roll my eyes at the old timers who'd hover and tell me to slow down, figured they were just being picky about their turf. Getting called out like that stings for about five minutes, then you realize the whole point is that dirt tells a story and once you slice through it the story is GONE. Re-photographing a whole square sounds rough but at least the crew caught it before more damage was done. These days I scrape flat and shallow without even thinking about it, and I've turned into the person gently telling new volunteers to ease up. Funny how that works out.
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