Field notebooks are gone, now I log every shovel test on a tablet. Miss the smudges though.

Back in 2011 I was on a dig outside Santa Fe and we used these little Rite in the Rain notebooks. Every unit, every level, every piece of chert flake got drawn and noted by hand. My handwriting was awful, half the pages had dirt smears, and one time it rained and my whole afternoon's notes turned into a blue ink puddle. But there was something about that physical record, you know? You could flip back and see the actual pressure of the pencil when someone got excited about a potsherd. Now I run a CRM survey crew and we log everything into a rugged tablet with a GIS app. It's faster, it geotags every shovel test, and the data goes straight to the client without me transcribing 40 pages at night. I don't miss the hand cramps. But last week I pulled out my old field book from that Santa Fe project, and the pages where I sketched a possible hearth feature, the shading, the little arrows, that told me more than any polygon I've drawn since. Anyone else make the switch from paper to digital in the field? Do you ever miss the tactile notes, or am I just being nostalgic about dirty paper? Also, how do you handle site sketches on a tablet, because I still default to a piece of graph paper for those.

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