Had a museum curator tell me my trowel marks were too aggressive on a dig last summer

She said I was scraping away context instead of revealing it, so I switched to a smaller trowel and started working from the outside in, and the difference in detail I can spot now is night and day, has anyone else gotten feedback that totally changed their approach to excavating?

2 comments

2 Comments

jason_robinson1mo ago

The trick isn't just the trowel size (though that helps a lot), it's the angle of the blade and how you hold it. I switched to a rounded-point trowel and started using a scraping motion instead of a digging one, which let me feel the soil change before I cut into it. You want the trowel almost parallel to the ground, with your wrist loose, so you're shaving off thin layers rather than gouging. Angela, I get what you're saying about finding edges, but aggressive scraping can smear the boundary lines and mix up the fill layers, which is where the real data lives. Once I slowed down and started working in small squares (no bigger than a foot across), I could actually see the difference between a post hole and a rodent burrow. It's a patience game for sure, but the context you save is worth it.

angelaellis1mo ago

Respectfully disagree - aggressive troweling finds the real edges faster (in my experience).

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