Serious question about how we document dig sites today

My old professor back at UW-Madison used to map everything by hand. Graph paper, colored pencils, the whole deal. I found one of his notebooks from 1998 last week. It had 47 different symbols for soil layers and artifact types. Real beautiful work. Now we just snap photos on iPads and call it a day. Is anyone else worried we're losing something by not drawing things out anymore?

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jade_hunt4823h ago

Do you think the digital photos capture the subtle details the way a hand drawing does? I worked on a dig in Montana a few years back where the soil changed color every few inches, and the camera just flattened it all out. The act of drawing forces you to really look, to notice small differences in texture and shade that you might skip over when you're just tapping a screen. There is something about the slow, deliberate process of marking each layer by hand that imprints the site in your memory a lot deeper than scrolling through a photo library ever could.