A dig director in Abilene said my trowel scars were destroying context, so I switched to a spoon
I was working a late Archaic site outside Abilene last summer and scraping away with a 4 inch trowel like I always did, until the director stopped me and pointed out I was slicing right through the stratigraphy. She handed me a plastic spoon from her lunch bag and said to dig in 2 cm passes and bag every flake separately, which felt absurd for about an hour. Now my unit walls look like a cake slice instead of a mudslide, but has anyone else had a supervisor basically rebuild how you dig from scratch?