Just realized my old dig notebook from 1998 is better than any app I've tried since

Mason Fisher · 2026-10-18T06:50:04.412066+00:00

My niece came by last weekend and saw my shelf of field notebooks from the 90s and asked why I don't just scan everything into a database like her class does now. I pulled down the one from a survey near Flagstaff, summer of 1998, and showed her the pencil sketch of a basin metate still half in the ground with the depth marked on the side. She said her app has a photo tool, but I pointed out that my note said "soil feels like cornmeal, wind picked up, bagged the flakes in a bread bag" and no app is asking me how the dirt felt that day. It hit different because I hadn't thought about that in years, but the little stuff like the weather and the bread bags is what I remember, and the coordinates were the easy part. She wants to digitize the whole shelf for me, and I'm not against it, but I keep thinking scanning loses the coffee ring on page 40 that tells me when we took a break. Anyone here keep paper notes alongside the digital records, or did you make the full jump and never look back?

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Just realized my old dig notebook from 1998 is better than any app I've tried since | Archaeology Discoveries - Topic Shares