AA-2026-28B619
On the image
Somebody has sliced into a hillside and left a wall of exposed strata standing like a cake cut open for inspection, and two young men in white shirts have wandered over to have a look. One holds a small notebook and writes something down with the gravity of a man who believes his notes will matter later, while the other stands with his hands on his hips, supervising the writing rather than doing any of it himself.
This is the look of amateur or student-level fieldwork, the kind practiced by geology classes, construction surveyors, or weekend collectors chasing a seam of coal or fossil-bearing shale exposed by a road cut or borrow pit. Nobody here is wearing a hard hat, because in the 1960s a hard hat was still considered something other people needed. The mud on their boots suggests the notebook entry took longer to write than the site took to ruin their shoes.
The bare, layered earth behind them is doing all the actual communicating, each band a chapter of some prehistoric process neither man will fully explain to the other. They stand at the bottom of it looking very official about a hole in the ground, which is exactly the kind of scene that ends up filed away in someone's slide carousel for the next forty years.
The historian's note
The site shows a freshly cut earthen bank, likely an excavation, quarry face, or road cut, exposing multiple sedimentary layers characteristic of glacial or fluvial deposits common in eastern and midwestern North America. Such exposures were frequently examined informally by geology students, surveyors, or local collectors during the mid-twentieth century, often in connection with nearby construction or mining activity.
The men's attire, plain cotton shirts and work trousers rather than professional field gear, is typical of casual or academic fieldwork of the period rather than commercial mining operations. Personal protective equipment was not yet standard practice at small excavation sites in the 1960s, and note-taking by hand in the field remained the primary method of recording observations before the wider use of portable recording equipment.
No specific location or institution can be determined from the visual evidence, though the setting is consistent with a small-scale excavation or exposed cutbank typical of the era's informal earth science fieldwork.
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Two Men Examining a Soil Cut, 1960s Excavation Site. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-28B619. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-men-examining-a-soil-cut-1960s-excavation-site.
@misc{aaAA202628B619,
title = {Two Men Examining a Soil Cut, 1960s Excavation Site},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-28B619},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-men-examining-a-soil-cut-1960s-excavation-site}
}TY - ART TI - Two Men Examining a Soil Cut, 1960s Excavation Site PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-28B619 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-men-examining-a-soil-cut-1960s-excavation-site ER -
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