Kyra Bryson
During excavation we spend a lot of time digging and sifting through soil, or watching the surface of the ground for artifacts that may be present and can provide us with some information on the lives of the people who were living there in the past. There may be some information initially visible when something is found, but usually the artifacts need to be cleaned and further processed in order to actually understand what it can actually tell us about what activities were occurring at a site. When artifacts are found we place them into bags with the information for where, when, and by who they were found and then set aside to be washed later.
Washing artifacts is a very satisfying process where artifacts are placed into a small sieve in a small bin of water and then scrubbed with a toothbrush to remove the dirt from the artifact’s surface.
After we find the artifacts to be sufficiently cleaned with as much of the dirt off them as possible we lay them out onto trays with other artifacts from the same bag so that they can dry off while still remaining with other artifacts of the same context. The trays are then placed on drying racks and left to dry for a while so they can be further processed later.
