Trowel technique I used for 8 years was completely backward

I've been digging on volunteer digs off and on since 2016, mostly in the Northeast. Last fall at a site near Albany, a field school student looked at how I was holding my trowel and just said 'you know that's upside down, right?' I thought I was being efficient scraping toward myself, but apparently I was doing what they call a 'plow scrape' instead of the proper flat angle that protects the soil layers. The student showed me how to flip the handle so the blade sits flatter, and suddenly I could see subtle color changes in the dirt I'd been destroying for years. All those ceramic sherds I thought were just random finds, I probably missed half of them because I was digging too deep too fast. Has anyone else had a basic technique flaw pointed out by someone way younger, and did it make you question everything you'd done before?

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phoenix_thompson41mo ago

Honestly, that hits hard because the same thing happened to me with my pickaxe grip during a dig in Vermont. A college kid told me I was swinging it like a lumberjack instead of using the weight of the tool to chip away at the soil. He showed me a softer wrist motion and suddenly I wasn't smashing half the artifacts I thought I was carefully uncovering. It made me feel like an idiot for years of doing it wrong, but then I realized that every dig teaches you something new, even if it comes from a 19 year old with fresh eyes. I spent the whole next season re-learning how to read the ground, and honestly my finds got way better once I stopped fighting the dirt. Now I always ask the youngest person on site to watch me work once in a while, because they usually spot something my habits have blinded me to.

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