trowel fodder
n.— «Excavations are often very expensive or simply use students as “trowel fodder,” providing no training at all.» —“Archaeology in Further Education” by Dave Jones Education and the Historic Environment Mar. 2, 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...