Appreciation post: the 1970s field notes from my old professor's dig in Turkey beat anything I've read on a tablet

Nina Owens · 2026-10-02T20:15:04.752468+00:00

Cleaning out a box from my grad school days, I found copies of Dr. H's field notebooks from a dig at Catalhoyuk in 1973. Every page had smudged pencil drawings of stratigraphy, dirt stains, and little notes like "rain all day, trench flooded, moved to east wall." Last summer I used a tablet app on a survey in New Mexico and it was fast and neat but it lost all that mess, the weather, the mood, the mistakes. You can read a database entry but you can't feel the day someone found a seal stamp after six weeks of nothing. Has anyone else worked with old paper records that just carry more than digital ones do?

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Appreciation post: the 1970s field notes from my old professor's dig in Turkey beat anything I've read on a tablet | Archaeology Discoveries - Thought Shares