AA-2026-373848
On the image
Someone has laid a rock hammer across banded red-and-purple sediment, the universal field-geology gesture that says this layering matters and also, more usefully, here is a familiar object roughly a foot long so you can judge how big the layering actually is. No ruler, no ID card, no scientist mugging for scale in a hard hat. Just the hammer, dropped with the unstudied confidence of a person who does this every week.
The rock itself is doing something a photograph explains better than a notebook ever could, showing fine parallel banding that took longer to form than anyone in 1960s fieldwork could ever be present for. The geologist knew that, filed the specimen number somewhere, and moved on to the next outcrop before lunch. The hammer stayed exactly where it landed because in this line of work, precision about the rock always outranked tidiness about the tools.
The historian's note
This is a field photograph typical of geological surveying and stratigraphic research conducted in the 1960s, when documenting rock exposures with a hand-held rock hammer for visual scale was standard practice amongst field geologists and university survey teams. The banded coloration visible in the outcrop reflects alternating mineral deposition, likely iron oxide staining, characteristic of sedimentary or metasedimentary formations studied for stratigraphic dating and mineral prospecting during this period.
Such images were commonly produced as part of academic fieldwork, government geological surveys, or mining exploration records, serving as both scientific documentation and teaching material. The rock hammer itself, a standard geologist's tool with a pointed pick end, was a near-universal piece of field equipment carried for both scale reference and sample extraction.
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Rock Hammer for Scale on Banded Sedimentary Outcrop, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-373848. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/rock-hammer-for-scale-on-banded-sedimentary-outcrop-1960s.
@misc{aaAA2026373848,
title = {Rock Hammer for Scale on Banded Sedimentary Outcrop, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-373848},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/rock-hammer-for-scale-on-banded-sedimentary-outcrop-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Rock Hammer for Scale on Banded Sedimentary Outcrop, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-373848 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/rock-hammer-for-scale-on-banded-sedimentary-outcrop-1960s ER -
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