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Shoutout to the field crew that told me to stop digging with a trowel in wet clay at that site near Tucson
Two summers back I was working a Hohokam site outside Tucson and hit a layer of wet clay at 40cm. I could not decide between scraping it slow with a trowel or switching to a spoon and wooden pick. I went with the spoon because the crew chief said trowels smear clay and destroy stratigraphy. Turns out a small bowl of matrix was hiding a shell pendant that a trowel would have sliced right through. Has anyone else had a supervisor push back on tool changes mid excavation like that?
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elliot_gibson276d ago
My buddy ran into almost the exact same thing on a dig down in southern Arizona a few years back. He was scraping away with a trowel in some sticky wet dirt and his crew chief made him stop and grab a spoon instead. He was annoyed at the time because it was way slower, but then he pulled out a little shell bead that was sitting right there in the clay. A trowel would have cut it clean in half, no question. He still talks about how glad he was that someone spoke up. Those calls from a supervisor can feel like a pain in the moment but they save you from ruining stuff you can't get back.
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