Day 9: Selina's outline of finds processing

The past week mostly consisted of digging and interacting with people coming to the site, but one of the things I found myself enjoying most was our finds workshop.  Whilst in all honestly, brushing bone with a toothbrush in some lukewarm water is most definitely not the first thing I feel like doing in the morning, I found the exercise to be rather relaxing, though I had to enlist the help of Dan and Chiara on both sessions to clean the teeth for me – I sincerely refuse to like to texture, it’s so… gross. 

There’s not a lot to explain with the actual process of washing teeth; you fill up a bowl with warm water and brush the artefacts with a toothbrush, or a sponge if you’re unlucky enough and you then have to leave the artefacts to dry. Whilst I’ve lost the pictures of them being squeaky clean, I do have pictures of some of the artefacts we had to wash, though thankfully they can be seen even without the hard work of a toothbrush and a sponge.

After being left to dry, the artefacts had the wonderful chance of being written on with good old fashioned ink and nib pens. We soon found out that we all struggled with calligraphy apart from Cameron (who seemed to have partaken in calligraphy school at some point), though Nathan seemed to particularly struggle the most unfortunately, alongside Dan. From there, it was just a matter of finding where to write the artefacts context number and trench (which I embarrassingly mistook for II instead of IV, though nothing a quick line couldn’t fix). 

The conversation during the workshop managed to range from tennis to Godzilla, to Jurassic Park, to Pacific Rim and Bioshock – everything but archaeology and the artefacts we were cleaning. All in all, a successful finds workshop part 2!

Selina