That time I dropped a trowel down a test pit in Missouri

I was out near Cape Girardeau last summer, doing a Phase I survey on a proposed housing development. We were digging test pits looking for any prehistoric or historic stuff before construction. I was about 60 centimeters down, pulling out dirt, and my trowel slipped right out of my hand. It fell straight to the bottom and I could hear it hit something that sounded like metal. At first I thought it was just a rock but I dug another 10 centimeters and pulled out a rusty old horseshoe from the 1800s maybe. The trowel actually saved that artifact from getting scraped up by the shovel. Now I always keep a second trowel clipped to my belt loop when I'm working deep pits. Has anyone else had a tool mishap lead to finding something unexpected?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_vera1mo ago

Ruby_sanchez45 I gotta push back on the horseshoe luck charm thing. That sounds like folklore people tell at history fairs, not something you'd actually find buried on purpose near a doorway. More likely that horseshoe was just tossed aside or lost by some farmer shoeing his horse. The real lesson here is that dropping tools is just part of the gig when you're digging deep like that. Having a backup trowel clipped on is smart but honestly I've seen guys lose whole shovels down test pits and never get them back. It happens. The artifact being saved is just dumb luck not because your trowel had some purpose.

ruby_sanchez451mo ago

Oh man, that's wild! I actually read somewhere that old horseshoes were sometimes used as good luck charms by settlers and they'd bury them near doorways. Pretty cool that your trowel slip ended up saving a piece of history instead of just being a pain in the butt. I remember hearing a story from a buddy who works in Indiana and he dropped his whole tool bag down a deep test hole once. Took him like an hour to fish everything out with a magnet on a string. Lesson learned I guess, always clip your stuff down!