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Picked a trowel over a shovel for digging test pits last summer
My dig director told me shovels would save time but I went with hand tools anyway and found a Roman coin fragment less than 6 inches down has anyone else had luck sticking with small tools over big ones?
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simonw411mo ago
Found a Roman coin fragment less than 6 inches down" - see that's the thing, sometimes the surface stuff is where it's at. I've been doing this long enough to know that a shovel is great for getting through topsoil fast but you lose all that fine control. A trowel lets you feel every little change in the soil texture, every tiny pebble that could be something important. I remember digging a test pit in a field that looked totally empty, and with my trowel I found a whole Medieval buckle at maybe 4 inches. The guy next to me with a shovel came up with nothing because he was blasting through layers too fast. So yeah, your director's not wrong about time, but speed don't mean much if you're missing the good stuff right under your nose.
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