Arnit has been excavating for 34 years now, and he has his own archaeology-excavating company. I talked to him about what it’s like to be a backhoe operator on archaeology digs. A condensed and edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sarah Zhang : According to YouTube, you can write your name with a sharpie and a backhoe.

Dan Arnit: That was downtown. I was moving a cemetery with an archaeologist and osteologist. Because we were working so close to each other, I’d pluck a trowel out of someone’s back pocket with the backhoe and stuff like that, just messing with them. They said, "Can you write your name with that." I said, "I have no idea."

So the last day of the project, they came out with a box and a Sharpie and said, "All right, write your name." And then like a smart-ass, I said, "Do you want this in cursive?" So I tried cursive. I had no idea I could do that.

Zhang: How did you get into the business of operating backhoes on archaeology sites?

Arnit: I first started working for a plumbing company and that's the very first time I started learning the backhoe. Then Bob Foote of Foote Excavating, he hired me away from the plumbing company. He saw me working and he came up in his backhoe and said, "Hey, how much you're making? I'll give you three dollars an hour more if you come with me." I was like, "Yeah, see ya."

I went to work for Bob. and Bob was doing archaeology excavating with the University of Arizona. When Bob sent me out and said, “Here go dig on an archaeology site,” I'm like, “Why are we digging this with a backhoe?” I didn't understand until I got there. I got to know everybody. I bought all of the books. I asked questions. I was basically enrolled in school at that point, and I'm still in school, as far as I'm concerned. I didn’t go to college. Everything I know is pretty much self-taught.

Zhang: What exactly do you do on a dig?

Arnit: I started doing trenching and stuff. At first, all we did if we wanted to find more was to put another trench in the ground until we almost wiped out the entire site. So I came up with the blade for skimming the surface like a wood plane, taking it down until you hit the top of the feature. You're not digging through it and destroying part of it. I can take off one millimeter at a time.

If you take off too much dirt at once, it's like pages of a book. If I do it right, it's one page after another, and you don't lose any of the story. But if you take too much, you're ripping four or five pages out of the book and now there's a gap. And you're going to get the whole story if you keep doing it. It's not that I dig that slow. It's just I know when to speed up and when to slow down.

Zhang: At this point you were making your own blade, right? How did you learn to do everything?

Arnit: My father was an inventor. He was a mechanical engineer. My brother was an inventor, and it just runs in the family. I did a lot of taking stuff apart and pissing off Mom and Dad. I knew what I needed. And then I just used parts. I'm using a grader blade that's off a road grader and then I fabricated it to the bucket.

Zhang: You talk about “reading the soil” when you’re digging. What do you look for when you’re sitting up in the tractor?