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I used to dig with a hand trowel and a ruler, now I map everything with a phone app and it bugs me
Six years back I was on a Roman villa site outside Bath and every find went into a paper bag with a number written on it in pencil. I had a clipboard, a dumpy level, and a 30 meter tape, and if I wanted a plan view I sat in the dirt for two hours drawing squares. Two summers ago the same crew handed me a tablet and told me to shoot points with a total station tied to a GIS app, and now every sherd gets a GPS coordinate before it even comes out of the ground. The weird part is how much faster it goes. What took a full day of drawing at Cirencester we now knock out in 40 minutes, and the context sheets sync straight to the archive. But I miss the feel of it. When you draw a section by hand you notice every layer change because your pencil drags on it, and the tablet just does not give you that. Anyone else find their eye for stratigraphy got a bit lazy once the software started doing the remembering? I am genuinely torn on whether that trade is worth it.
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the_jason13d ago
Try a hybrid approach. Keep the tablet for points and context sheets but make yourself sketch the section by hand first, then shoot it. I did that on a dig in York last season and it changed everything. You still get the speed of the GIS for the archive, but your hand is on the paper noticing where the clay turns to silt because the pencil catches. Another trick is to set the trowel down every 10cm and just stare at the wall before you shoot anything. Sounds dumb but it works.
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