My old professor said field notes beat fancy 3D scans at a dig in Portugal, and I pushed back hard
He came to visit our trench outside Evora last month and watched us fly the drone for two hours. He said the scans are nice for the report but he has never once seen them pick up a floor layer the excavators missed with graph paper. I argued that photogrammetry caught a wall alignment at a site in Peru that no one spotted by hand. But he pulled out a notebook from 1983 and showed me the same wall, drawn to scale, dated, and signed. Now I am stuck wondering if we are trading good eyes for cool toys, and I want to hear from diggers who have run both.