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Spent 4 hours in a trench in Arizona before my trowel told me I was digging the wrong way
I was screening dirt at a site near Tucson and kept pulling out tiny bone bits and thinking they were just rocks. My field school teacher finally came over and flipped my trowel so the flat side was down, and suddenly every scrape was clean and I could actually see a change in soil color. Turns out I had been digging at a 45 degree angle for 4 hours and smearing all the stratigraphy together, which is basically archaeology murder. She told me to always keep my trowel flat and let the dirt tell the story, not my wrist. How do you all keep your edges clean when the soil gets crumbly?
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fiona_clark1mo ago
Kept a spray bottle in my bag after my first crumbly site and just misted the wall a tiny bit before each pass, which made the soil hold together enough to see the color change. Also scraping in one direction instead of back and forth helps a lot, since going over the same spot twice is what smears everything. It feels slow at first but you save way more time not having to redo your whole unit.
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