Went to a dig with a trowel vs a shovel and the difference was night and day

Last summer I volunteered on a Roman site near Bath and brought my standard contractor shovel. The site director handed me a 4 inch trowel and said to use that instead. Within an hour I was picking out pottery shards and tiny bones I'd have smashed with the shovel. We turned up over 30 identifiable pieces that day versus maybe 5 the previous day with just shovels. Has anyone else switched tools on a site and seen way better results?

3 comments

3 Comments

morgan_ramirez1mo ago

Used to think trowels were for gardening, not real digging. Took one day at a site near Chester to change my mind completely. Found a whole brooch that would've been two pieces with a shovel.

claire_wells871mo ago

Yeah, but here's the thing nobody mentions... trowels actually change how you _see_ the ground. @felix147 mentioned the scalpel thing, but it's more than that. With a shovel you're just chasing the dirt, but a trowel forces you to read the soil layers as you go. That brooch at Chester probably had a dark stain around it in the earth, a little halo of decayed metal or fabric. A shovel blade would've cut right through that signal, but the trowel lets you spot those subtle color shifts before you even hit the object. It's like learning a whole new language of the ground.

felix1471mo ago

Isn't it funny how the smaller tool actually does way more work? That Chester brooch find is exactly what I mean, @morgan_ramirez. A shovel would have just turned that into a broken piece of scrap, but the trowel lets you actually see what you're cutting into. I bet your site director had the same annoyed look mine did when they handed me that trowel like they knew I'd come around by lunch. It's like the difference between a wood chipper and a scalpel once you get the hang of it.