Chose a dusty old field notebook over the fancy excavation app on my last dig

Holly Lane · 2026-08-08T23:55:05.57822+00:00

I had to pick between using the team's new tablet app with 3D mapping or sticking with my paper field notebook from the 1980s that I found in my mentor's garage. I went with the notebook because it had his handwritten notes on a site near the same river valley, and I figured his methods might match what we were digging. Honestly, it slowed me down for the first two days, since I had to draw every trench grid by hand while everyone else tapped screens. But on day three, I caught a small change in soil color that the app's preset layers completely missed, and it led us to a second pit that wasn't in the survey. The crew supervisor asked me how I spotted it, and I just flipped to page 14 where my mentor had sketched the same anomaly back in 1987. Have any of you ever trusted an old paper source over a digital tool, and did it actually pay off or just waste your time?

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Chose a dusty old field notebook over the fancy excavation app on my last dig | Archaeology Discoveries - Thought Shares