Field School - Cataloguing

Monday was lab day for me. Thought I'd break that part of the chat out and deal with it seperately.

The cataloguing of artifacts is what comes after their cleaning. It is essentially the paperwork part of the project where everything that has been found is organized and documented.

Here is a view of our work area part-way through the process.

While this may look somewhat chaotic at first glance, it's really not. Or, at least we can call it an organized chaos. It makes more sense when you take a closer look at what is on the tables.


In this situation, each white piece of paper is a log of all the artifacts found in a specific shovel test probe (STP). Each artifact type receives it's own line on the document where it is described, a count is given of how many pieces of that type are present, and a total combined weight of those artifacts is noted. Each line correlates to a unique catalogue number. At the top of the sheet is all the relevant general information pertaining to the project itself. When the cataloguing is complete, the details on these sheets will be entered into the computer database.

Each artifact type also gets a smaller tan tag. Information recorded on this tag relates it back to the catalogue entry.

Here is another batch that is a little bit further along in the process.

At this point all the paperwork is complete. Now we have to write the catalogue numbers on the artifacts themselves. To do this we first apply a water soluble coating to the writing surface. This is done so that the numbers can be removed at a later date should the need arise. On lighter colored artifacts we apply a clear coating. The darker items get a white paint so that our black ink will be visible. You can see this on a couple of the items above. Then the numbers are written on top of that base coating. Afterwards, a clear coating is applied as a sealant so the numbers don't get rubbed off during handling.

Now they are ready to be bagged and boxed. The artifacts themselves stay with the tan tags, with each tag and its associated artifacts getting an individual bag.

For this project we grouped the invidual bags according to artifact type. All the similar smaller bags went into one larger bag which was labeled as to what it contained and where they came from. Then all the large bags were boxed up together, with the boxes being labeled in a similar manner.

The completed boxes go into the curation facility. There the artifacts will be available for future analysis.