Hello Buddies! Rae here, back again and pleased to
announce that I will be returning to Fort St. Joseph as the lab coordinator for
the 2019 field season! I am so excited to continue working with the Project for
another summer!
This year I had the opportunity to help take part in
the collections integration process of Fort St. Joseph’s 2018 artifacts. It was
a new process for me and there was definitely a period of figuring things out
before I got the hang of it. After many hours spent inventorying by Dr.
Nassaney and the rest of the FSJ crew, all of the artifacts from the 2018 field
season were ready to be integrated into the permanent collection at the Niles
History Center. Meghan, Cameron, and I packed up all of the artifacts at WMU’s
archaeology lab and headed down to Niles!
In addition to the 2018 artifacts, we also brought all
of the float samples from a couple of years that had still been at the
archaeology lab at WMU. The float sample was also going to be given a new home
in the collection and be transferred into new boxes! Once we arrived at Niles,
we got to work putting together the new boxes. The float sample collection is
organized by accessions. Within the accession there are the high fraction and
low fraction samples. The collection was re organized into its new boxes and
then we were able to start integrating the 2018 artifacts!
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| A few boxes of the permanent collection laid out while we were integrating the 2018 artifacts. Photo courtesy of Raegan Delmonico. |
Now a little background on artifact organization! All
of the artifacts are sorted and cleaned by the students at the field school.
They are separated by material, but all of the materials in the same accession are
kept together, basically it is one big bag full of a bunch of smaller
bags. However, the collection in Niles,
is sorted by material. All of the smaller bags from within each accession are
then sorted into larger boxes, with all of the other bags of that same material
in the entire collection. For example, we take all of the little bags of
calcine bone and put them in a box of all of the other bags of calcine bones
from all of the accessions throughout the years of excavation. The entire
process wasn’t difficult but organizing it all in your head can be a little
intimidating. It was definitely a good experience to have and a chance to learn
something new!
