Nov. 19

Today I was at the lab, analyzing the material culture we'd dug up. We began by checking the bags we had against the notes that were taken during excavations. In some cases, the notes did not record all the bags, which was not a problem because we could note the existence of the unrecorded bags retrospectively, but this made me realize the importance of note-taking during excavation (also, the difficulty of recording everything accurately!). Afterwards, we had to wash each object. Most of the artifacts were fairly sturdy, which somewhat clashed with the pre-existing notion I had that all material culture is fragile. That can be true, and all material culture should be treated carefully anyway, but the artifacts that survive are tough--they've lasted for a long time already!

After washing the items, we laid them out in trays to dry, dividing them by type and context to take photographs later on. We could even sort the glass and ceramic pieces into various subgroups. Glass, for instance, the most well-represented type of artifact, could be sorted by color and type. In the glass archaeology course I took last semester, one point of discussion that came up was the arbitrariness of how different researchers described different colors. I experienced that first hand today, trying to classify each color I saw. In the end I ended up with groups such as: "light olve, dark olive, thick aqua, opaque white," etc. Sometimes, it was even possible to see that two pieces came from the same cup or bottle. However, diagnostic pieces were few in number because most of the shards were quite small. Next time, we will be trying to date the various pieces of artifacts by comparing them to the database of manufactured goods from the last century, which is very comprehensive (so the challenge will be to identify the small samples we have).