Field school taught me trowel work, but a $2 paintbrush fixed my excavation technique

Back in 2018 I was at a dig outside Santa Fe and the supervisor kept yelling at me for scraping too deep. I thought I was being careful, standard trowel angle, all that. Then one afternoon he handed me a cheap stiff paintbrush and said "use this to chase the layer, not the metal." I figured it was some old timer thing. But after two weeks of switching between brush and trowel based on soil texture, my feature outlines came out way cleaner. Now I won't touch a surface without a brush in my pack. Anyone else find that the basic tools everyone dismisses actually separate good field work from great field work? What's your weird tool that changed how you dig?

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umab864d ago

My buddy swore by a dental pick until he dropped it down a test unit.