Troweling Techniques

As an aspiring archaeologist, I feel that it is important to describe the various troweling and shoveling techniques that are needed in the excavation process.  Here is a trowel:

This is one of your most important excavation instruments.  Obviously, you hold it from the wooden handle, but you want to make sure you have a good, firm grip as you are using this devise to chop and scrap and basically wrestle your way through the dirt.  You will be developing impressive hand muscles as a result, and you will get the most annoying blisters when first learning how to trowel.  I place my hand on the edge of the wooden handle as close to, even touching, the beginning of the metal portion of the trowel.  Different ways of placing your hand and fingers allow you to apply a certain amount of pressure depending on the feature and texture of the soil.  For a scrape, you want your hand and the blade to be parallel to the ground and pull the trowel towards you.  Keep a firm grip, or else your trowel will "chatter" and make little lines instead of a smooth groove along the soil, and we archaeologists are all about perfection.  Place more pressure towards the point of the trowel to cover a smaller area and allow for your tool to cut through tougher spots in the sediment.  When the soil is too hard (for us, the dirt was like concrete and almost impossible to excavate through!) there are water sprayers you can use to cover the soil with a thin layer of water.  This does not turn the water into mud but instead spares you at least a year from undergoing early arthritis.  Your trowel will become precious to you over time, so do what you can to prevent it from rusting and make sure you sharpen it to make life easier.

When the trowel isn't going deep enough for us, then we turn to drastic sources.  

A shovel will be your best friend when busting through sod and the plow zone (which is one of the first layers we encounter in excavating - it is the sediment that has been churned from years of human activity and movement of the earth and has a combination of elements out of context from the next level.  Context is important!!).  We do not use a shovel, however, for going through each layer like a trowel, where you have a close-up view of each feature and each story of history told in the soil when on your knees.  Instead, a shovel makes you thankful you do not have to use your tiny trowel to get through the heavy and hard layer of grass and plow zone.  It also lets you make straighter walls for your unit as you cut through the sod and get to the beautiful layer of sediment below.  And when you are frustrated with the dirt, you can always use a trenching shovel to make a combination of a shovel and a trowel!

And, of course, when all else fails and we feel lazy, archaeologists can rely on the beauty of technological advancement to break through the sod more effectively than a shovel and fill up the dirt in our units faster than multiple crews with shovels combined.

God bless technology.