grays13•1mo agoMost Upvoted

That comment about my excavation trowel being too dull changed my whole dig season

Guy from a field school in Arizona told me I was scraping instead of cutting, and after I sharpened it properly I started finding tiny bone fragments I'd been missing - anyone else had a tool critique that actually improved their work?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_jennifer1mo ago

Three weeks into my first dig in Montana and the field director basically laughed at the way I was using a 2-inch WHS trowel. Told me I was "gardening, not excavating." So I went back to the lab, watched a guy from Wyoming use his Apex trowel like a scalpel, and sharpened mine to where you could shave with it. Next day I found three articulated rodent vertebrae I would've totally crushed. It's humiliating in the moment but that dude basically saved my whole field season.

lewis.finley1mo ago

Love that you kept at it and learned from it.

nancyj111mo ago

Hang on, so what did you do differently with your wrist or hand position once you sharpened it? I'm trying to picture the difference between a gardening motion and a scalpel motion, like were you going from a full-arm sweep to more of a finger-and-wrist thing? @the_jennifer I've always wondered if that kind of difference is more about the tool or the technique, like could you have done the same thing with a dull trowel if you just moved slower?