TIL I was brushing my dig site wrong for 2 full seasons

I was at a site near Santa Fe last month brushing sediment off a pot sherd when the lead archaeologist walked over and asked why I was dragging the bristles across the artifact. I thought you always brush away from yourself, but she pointed out that dry brushing against the grain was actually scratching the surface. Turns out I had been doing it this way since my first field school in Colorado back in 2021. Nobody ever corrected me because most people just assume you know what you're doing. I spent like 300 hours over two summers possibly damaging stuff that other people have to study later. Has anyone else had a mentor point out a basic technique you were messing up for way too long?

4 comments

4 Comments

sandraflores6d ago

Ask @reese_nelson if they've ever accidentally wrecked an artifact with bad technique for 300 hours.

river3206d ago

Oh man, your story hits close to home. Similar thing happened to me at a site in Montana last year. I had been using a trowel the wrong way for months, scraping in a direction that just piled all the dirt back onto the area I already cleaned. The supervisor finally saw me and just shook her head. She showed me the proper angle and how to pull the dirt toward me instead of pushing it away. Felt like an idiot, but at least I caught it before I ruined anything important. Small corrections like that can make a huge difference over time.

reese_nelson6d ago

Honestly, is it really that big of a deal? You were still uncovering stuff, weren't you? Sometimes I wonder if supervisors just want to feel useful by nitpicking the way someone scrapes dirt. If no artifacts got broken and the area was still being cleared, then you were getting the job done. All this fuss over trowel angle seems like overthinking something that works fine either way.

christopherwilson6d ago

Whoa, @reese_nelson I gotta say I disagree hard here! A trowel angle might sound picky but it's literally the difference between seeing a faint stain or scraping it away forever. One bad angle and you might turn a posthole outline into just some random dirt smear. It's not about supervisors wanting to feel useful, it's about not trashing the only evidence we have. Small fixes now save giant regrets later.