We’re now into our third week of working on processing the artifacts in the historical archaeology lab here at UC Berkeley. We’ve already completed the washing, sorting, bagging, and labeling of artifacts from a few of our shovel test pits, and things are moving quickly, thanks to the sixteen undergraduate students helping me! Here’s what we’re doing….
First, we wash each artifact individually with a toothbrush and water to remove the dirt. Once the cleaned artifacts are dry, we sort them by material type (i.e. metal, ceramic, glass, etc.) and bag them with information detailing where they came from on the site. At this point, we also label all of the fragments of glass, ceramic, bone, and tobacco pipe directly with their location of origin on the site (using archival ink). This will allow us to freely study these artifacts later on (like trying to see which fragments can be glued back together) without losing track of their provenience. There are photos each of the steps of this process here, and you can meet some of the UCB students helping me.