A field school supervisor's comment about my trowel grip stuck with me for 6 years

Back in 2018 at a dig outside Santa Fe, the field school supervisor watched me excavate for about 2 minutes and said "you're scraping, not troweling, you're gonna lose context." I had been holding the trowel like a paint scraper, flat and aggressive. She made me switch to a low angle, pulling toward myself in thin passes. It felt awkward for a month, but after that season my unit profiles were way cleaner and I stopped smearing the soil layers together. Has anyone else had a pro correct a basic habit that totally shifted how you work on site?

1 comments

1 Comment

wendysanchez27d ago

My trowel elbow still aches thinking about my first supervisor in Montana who made me redo a whole 10cm level because I was digging like a backhoe, and once I switched to those wrist-flick passes everything just clicked, lol.