6/25/2007

Good times in the archaeology lab today. Ali and Lauren stay with me today and we amazingly got everything washed and sorted today. It's quite nice to be caught up with the lab work. I've also gotten pretty good at sorting items now. Certain things like glass, plastic, metal, and bone are usually really easy to sort. However, dealing with ceramics can be really tough. The worst is trying to decide if something is rock or ceramic or something completely different. It took a few times to get the hang of sorting in the first. What was harder was setting down an identification system. It took a decent amount of trial and error, lots of retyping the list, and multiple printings of each time. Poor trees, they must hate me for doing so many copies. Though, when I printed the labels to put in each bag, that probably made the trees even sadder. It was nice though getting to rework the labels so that they were appropiate to this field school. It was also really nice to be able to clean out the lab that had decades of junk piled up. It took some serious cleaning skills to spurse up the place, but it's clean and so much is organized. This is all a really helpful pre-cursor to going to graduate school in museum science. My first classes will be collection management, data management, and preventative conservation. It'll be interesting to see what I can transfer over.