I remember reading a different archaeologist talking about managing his team of excavators. A lot of them were volunteers from a nearby senior citizen center. One of his team of really old Ethiopian immigrants was convinced that archaeologists carefully used brushes and toothbrushes on everything and could not be convinced otherwise, so he basically had the guy do anything detailed.

Truth to be told I simplified a lot in this comic, but still that of the brush-wielding maniac is a widespread misconception of the archaeologist, as your tale confirmed. In actual practice, however, the use of the brush is counterproductive. I speak from the point of view of a protohistoric archaeologist (somewhere between the prehistoric and "classic" archaeologist), for this reason I perhaps think mostly in terms of layers and negative structures (holes, ditches...) than in that of walls and constructions -so to speak- and brushes are no use on those. Don't get me wrong, though, the methodolgy of excavation does not change from a prehistorical one to a protohistorical or classical ones, what it does change is the likeliness of finding certain types of traces and therefore the "strategies" of approach. But I digress.
Why is brush not useful -and even counterproductive- then? As I said in this comic archaeologists remove one layer at a time, going from the stratigraphically most recent one (usually the topmost) to the oldest, proceding in a reverse chronological order. How do you distinguis one leyer of ground from an other? Usually by manner of one or more of these three factors: color, composition, consistence*. When you dig with pick and showel, however, the ground gets littered with pieces of earth, trampled, and everything usually looks more or less the same and the layers confines are almost impossible to distinguish. Here come in play the trowel: using the border of the tool archaeologists scratch the surface of the ground, removing it first millimeter, which might be mixed as a result of your previous activities or dried by the sun (and therefore faded in colour), thus revealing the true colors of each layer. If you use a brush on the ground it simply moves around pieces of ground doing the exact opposite of what you should be doing. Brushes are useful on bones, on stone or brick buildings and things like that.

Sorry for the wall of text but archaeology has had, and it's still having, a hard time becoming a science and not just a passtime for the rich and bored (this sentence may seem inappropriate for the present day but -believe me- at least in Italy often it is not so) and I believe that enstablishing and applying the correct methodology is the only way out.
I apologize if this has bored you, cheers!


*I'm unaware of the correct english terminology here, I'm translating from italian.

Consistency, I think.

I remember another archaeologist talking about how their team included possibly the best bulldozer user in the world, skilled at basically taking down a few centimeters at a time. This came up while watching Raiders of the Lost Ark - the scene where Beloq talks about how the Germans "would use a bulldozer to find a china cup" - and in fact this person literally had come close.

What you said about the trowel and about the legitimization of archaeology makes a lot of sense to me, as an outsider (my degree's actually biology, and I'm not employed in that field). It makes sense that someone would make the greatest use of an intermediate sized tool, and I can see working in one of the big areas running into a lot of assumptions (I'd imagine that most people assume anything you're working on is late Republican/early Imperial Roman stuff, whereas someone working in the USA might not have that sort of assumption).

lawl, i think i can hear the "TA-DAAAAAA!!" on the trowel



Damn, your way of puttin things

I wanted to add little angels with trumpets around also, but that seem exaggerated.

So when do you plan to start using cheap modern drones to simplify the last panel?

Drones have been used, sometimes, but their application to archaeological reseach is not an impelling necessity, I believe.
On a strictly practical level in my country archaeological research has little to no funds. Most of the excavations are "emergency excavations", as a result of evidence unearthed during infrastructural works, or preventive ground sounding before the beginning of one such work. In those cases there are cooperatives of archaeologist who are employed to do these excavations. The thing is that these cooperatives are payed and employed by the company that is doing the infrastructural work, after a -I don't know the english term- "gara d'appalto": each archaeological cooperative makes an offer of price for its work and the company decides which one to employ. This means that even though drones may be cheap, they would raise the price offer and make the cooperative that uses them less competitive on the market. Archaeologist are already, tipically, the least payed workers on a construction site, cutting thier pay is often unfeasible.
The situation changes in university or research institute kind of excavations, but these are very few and often still on a low budget. Here, however, you can sometimes find teams using drones.
While the price of a drone itself might not be too high (I am uninformed on the regard but the price I was told was actually quite high), in my country there's a strict legislation on the usage of these instruments, which would require the user to get a licence in drone flying that is both time consuming and pricy.
Practical economical matters aside the usefulness of drones should be also considered. No technology is in itself good or bad, as that depends on its application to the selected subject. I already wrote a lot of boring wall of text, so I shall try to be concise in this part:
While documenting a layer taking pictures is not enough because the contours of a layer of earth are not so neat as I have drawn; quite the contrary, the passage from a layer to an other sometimes can be discerned only by "feel" under your trowel, as one layer might be composed of the same minerals and other soil components as those around it, but differently structured (more compact, less "plastic" and so on). Moreover the passage from one layer to another in the majority of cases is not a "line" but its texture fades gradually upwards, downwards or in any other direction. This does not mean that layers are incoherent, they have a reason to their origin, and with those in mind the archaologist draws the line where is most significative.
Drawing a plan is the first step in it's study, in all aspects the plan is an archaological interpretation, more informative than a photo, because in a photograph some layers might be invisibile, while almost every other would be far less comprehensible in their reciprocal relatioships.
However photographs are sometimes used as a "base" for drawing maps, even in archaeological excavations. Those are called "photoplans". Thing is perspective deforms shapes. In order to create a photoplan you need a perfectly zenital photograph, which is probably possible to obtain with a drone mounted machine, but I don't know how easily. There are programs that stretch photographs in order to make them fit your surface, to correct the perspective error, but they require still to capture some points on the ground with topographic equipment. Instead of going through all these passages and complications, using said topographic equipment to draw the plan directly it's usually faster and easier (with some practice).

Wow, wasn't I wordy!

Yes, yes it was. But I did ask for it