Digging

Two hands and time can transform a mountain into a mole hill, or make a monument where once stood nothing more than a few standing stones. The sense of accomplishment you feel filling a hole in the earth or even making one, is as old as human beings themselves. Join a long long legacy of ditch diggers and sand spillers when you grab that shovel and send dirt flying all around you. A shovel is a tool for digging, lifting, and moving bulk materials, such as soil, coal, gravel, snow, sand, or ore. Shovels are extremely common tools that are used extensively in agriculture, construction, and gardening. In neolithic times and earlier a large animal's scapula (shoulder blade) was often used as a crude shovel. Given the central importance and cost of manual labour in industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the science of shoveling was something of great interest to developers of scientific management. It was research in the 1890s through 1910s that greatly expanded the existing idea of varied shovel designs with different-sized scoops, one for each material, based on the material's density. Under scientific management, it was no longer acceptable to use the same shovel for shoveling brown coal one day and gravel the next. The science of hand shoveling has long since mostly faded out of commercial concern thanks to extensive mechanization, such as bulldozers and other equipment. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=118668