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Time Team America

What's that in your back pocket?

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By Time Team on June 05, 2009
Atomic Fire Balls.jpg

Every trade has its extra-super-duper-top-secret-weapon. A photographer we know gets amazing lens effects with pantyhose. One makeup artist won't leave the house without a supply of toilet seat covers for blotting shiny spots.

You get the idea.

So we asked some Time Team America members about their extra-super-duper-top-secret-dig kit weapon. Here's what they said:

Chelsea Rose, Digging Team Leader: A little "leaf trowel" from Scotland. If a pointy trowel and a square trowel had a baby, it would be a leaf trowel.

Julie Schablitsky, Archaeologist : A bamboo chopstick lifted from my favorite Thai restaurant and sharpened in a pencil sharpener.  Bamboo won't scratch bone or other easily damaged artifacts. 

Joe Watkins, Archaeologist: A trusty 4-inch rectangular trowel to create square corners, slice through deposits, and flick centipedes out of dig units.

Meg Watters, Geophysicist: Duct tape and my soldering iron.

Eric Deetz, Excavation Strategist: Atomic fire balls. Nothing raises the crew's moral on cold days more than handing out these little hot jawbreakers. (Hey Eric--FYI it works for TV crews, too!)

Do you have a secret tool of the trade? Inquiring minds want to know!

photo credit Thomas Hawk / flickr / Creative Commons

3 Comments

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Couldn't agree more with Meg Watters. For all the geophysicists out there in the field, in any weather, all sorts of terrain DUCTAPE is tool number one !! Keeps your equipment flexible and running.
Apart from meters of DUCTAPE, also re-ajustable rip-ties are always in my back pocket.

Best of luck for TTA

Ferry van den Oever, The Netherlands

Posted by ferry on June 10, 2009 5:11 AM | Reply

I never leave home without a Swiss Army Knife, a handkerchief/bandana, and pencil and paper. The knife is like a little toolbox in and of itself; the bandana works for everything from bundling up small breakable objects to using as an ad-hoc bandage and anything else you can imagine; the paper is for taking notes and quick-sketching plans, ideas or just pictures and the pencil is self explanatory: they never freeze like a pen.

Posted by Mark on June 16, 2009 1:22 PM | Reply

I don't go anywhere without my WHS trowel which I got turned onto when I studied in England - http://www.archaeologytools.co.uk/whs-archaeology-trowel.html.

Posted by pete weiss on July 30, 2009 7:41 PM | Reply

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