How do you dig up stuff without breaking it? Theo (10)

Hello Theo,

Digging stuff up without breaking it is one of the archaeologist’s main skills! Admittedly, we don’t always succeed and it can be very difficult not to break an object/artefact. Especially since some of them are very old and fragile, and sometimes you notice it at the last moment and unfortunately it breaks. The pressure and weight of the soil can also break objects (especially very old pottery) and sometimes when you excavate, it is already broken and all you can do is salvage it as best as you can!

But we always do our best not to break anything: as soon as we find something fragile, we start using smaller tools such as wooden picks. Sometimes, as well, we have to ‘block-lift’ finds, meaning we dig all around them and take them out of the ground in a block of soil so they can be excavated more carefully in a lab/office.

In some other cases (and I had to do this many times when excavating cremation burials for example), we wrap bandages around the urn or fragile objects so we can limit the risks of it breaking as we lift it out of the ground.

It can be very difficult but as archaeologists, we always try to preserve the objects we excavate as best as we can!

Odile, January 2026