Compared a $40 trowel to my old garden spade at a dig in Tucson and the cheap one won
Last month I joined a survey at a site near Tucson and brought my trusty spade plus a cheap $40 pointing trowel I grabbed online. I figured the spade would do most of the work, but it kept slicing through the soil and messing up the stratigraphy, while the trowel let me peel back layers inch by inch. In two days I mapped 14 features with the trowel and only 3 with the spade before I gave up on it. The difference was control, the trowel let me see color changes in the dirt that the spade just chopped through. Anyone else had a cheap tool outdo the fancy one on a dig?