Thoughts from the Lab 🧐

Students washing and removing rust build up
from artifacts recovered as the site.

        After field school, then what? Pack everything up and head back to the lab, of course! The time has come to go over this season’s finds with a fine-toothed comb and wonder what must have been going through someone’s mind when they decided to bag some of this stuff (it is a learning process). 

When we were first learning to identify artifacts in the field, there was a tendency to err on the side of caution and keep anything that looked like it might be a good candidate. Furthermore, in those early days, we were in the upper layers of out pits and artifacts were small and few and far between, so anything we found felt significant. Flash back to the present and those of us in the lab find ourselves confronted with plenty of things that might have appeared significant in the bottom of a wet screen but seem less so in the cold fluorescent lights of Moore Hall.  

Sometimes these are things that, after gaining further experience, we can recognize as being of natural origin. Rocks of unusual shape are a common culprit, including the infamous mudstone, a mineral that can take such convoluted and strikingly planar shapes that it’s easy to mistake for bone, potsherds, stone flakes, slag, or any number of other things. (The best way to identify mudstone is color, consistency, and crunch. It typically takes on a uniform brown hue that the experienced eye can pick out as different from the mottled shades of artifacts, as well as a sandy or granular texture unlike the smooth face of bone or ceramic...and the snap it makes when you crush it between your fingers. Old as it might be, anything artificial that’s survived this long is going to be much tougher to break. There are exceptions, but fortunately few of them can be mistaken for mudstone.) 

Artifacts, bag tags, and lab essentials.

Other times, we simply have to throw stuff out. Tiny (<0.5cm, say) fragments of bone and shell might have seemed precious in the early days of excavation, but unless they happen to be from a tiny animal with tiny identifiable features, they’re just a hindrance. Love as we might to do isotope analysis and other tests to identify every single object we find, there’s never enough resources for it, including the most basic lab asset: space. Without space to keep artifacts, you can’t keep any artifacts, and over the years archaeologists worldwide have found so much stuff that they’re physically running out of storage facilities to hold them (there’s even a name for it: the “Curation Crisis”). 

It’s not all a reductionist slog, though. While in the lab, we have enough time and resources to identify mystery objects that in the field we had to label as ‘metal object’ and move on. One such lab discovery was an upholstery tack, used to hold fabric on to furniture the same was it is today. It’s striking to look at such a tiny object and realize it’s virtually the same design you see on an overstuffed leather couch. The inhabitants of Fort St. Joseph are often pictured as rough, smokey, log cabin dwelling people, but things like upholstery tacks remind us to challenge our assumptions about what their lives were like. The benefits of lab time!

-
Luke