Archaeology in the Archives

I've spent the last few days working in the archives, except this time I've been working on archaeological material instead of documents.

The medieval site the field school will be digging this year is called Mota Piece, and we also dug there last year. However, the castle had also done excavations at the site in previous years, especially 2007 and 2009. However, those were under a different archaeologist (not Sue, the Canadian archaeologist who has directed the excavations this year and last year). This earlier archaeologist had a very different system and we have hardly any of her notes, so a lot of the provenience (and thus information) has been lost.

Mota Piece is a one-hectare site, and in 2007/2009 several different trenches were opened at the site. However, the finds in the archives from that excavation are only labeled by context number (aka the layer of soil they were found in). However, without knowing WHERE on the site they were found, the context numbers are fairly meaningless. We know which artifacts were found in the same layers, but we don't know what, where, or how deep those layers were, and so we can't tie that information to any discoveries that might be made this year.

Sue was in the archives with me and we tried to sort out a system. The finds are all in bags that are numbered sequentially but arbitrarily (Bag 10.1 is context 23, Bag 10.2 is context 4a, Bag 10.3 is context 8 etc) so we grouped them together by context number so that we could label the bags with the context number (instead of peering at the tiny written label on each artifact to find out). The table wasn't big enough so we expanded to the floor (this is one of the two boxes!). Then I created a cross-reference sheet so that each artifact could be found by either bag number or context number. There were several complicating problems, including multiple bags with the same numbers, unlabelled artifacts, bags containing items from several different contexts, etc. 

After the older finds had been sorted out and cross-catalogued to the best of my ability, I switched to focusing on last year's excavation. I worked on an artifact inventory spreadsheet, and also read through all the field notes and context reports, as well as the final report that Sue has written about the excavation (below). 

I know this all probably sounds quite boring, but reading, organizing/cataloguing, and archaeology are all things I really enjoy doing, so this task was a perfect fit for me. :)