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Appreciation post: the trowel I almost threw away turned out to be my best tool at a dig in Utah
I was at a site outside Moab last spring, three weeks into a survey, and my Marshalltown trowel snapped clean at the shank while I was scraping a stubborn layer of compacted clay. I had a backup in my pack but it was a cheap one with a plastic handle that felt wrong in my hand, and for two days I kept fumbling every scrape because I could not get the feel for it. On day three I dug the broken one out of my bucket, wrapped the stub in duct tape, and just used it like a stubby scraper for the rest of the survey. It turned out the short handle gave me way better control in tight features, and I ended up finding two chert flakes and a bone fragment in spots I would have missed with the long trowel. I kept that broken thing for two more seasons before the tape finally gave out. Now I wonder how many other tools I have written off too fast. Has anyone else had a broken tool end up working better than the replacement?
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