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Spent 2 years brushing dirt off artifacts with a paintbrush before a grad student showed me the sink
So I volunteer at a small dig site outside Tucson every other Saturday, mostly cleaning up pottery shards and lithic flakes that come out of the unit. For like two years I was doing the whole delicate brush thing, spending 20 minutes on a single rim sherd, feeling super careful and professional about it. Then last month this grad student named Priya watches me hunching over a bucket with my little brush and just starts laughing. She grabs my shard, walks it over to a plastic tub, dunks it in water, and swirls it around for like 8 seconds. Comes out perfectly clean. Turns out for non-decorated utilitarian pottery, you just wash it. The brush is for dry screening or fragile stuff with pigment. I had been treating every plain brown body sherd like it was the Dead Sea Scrolls. Two years of wrist cramps for nothing. So my actual question is what other basic lab shortcuts did you all learn way too late?
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jakeharris4d ago
The "treating every plain brown body sherd like it was the Dead Sea Scrolls" thing is too real. Same deal with flotation samples, I spent weeks hand picking seeds out of dried dirt before someone told me you just dump the whole bucket in water and the light stuff floats to the top while the rocks sink. Saved me so much time I almost felt dumb for not figuring it out sooner.
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