Knocked over a box of labeled potsherds and still finding strays

I was at the UVA lab in Charlottesville cataloging stuff from a dig last spring when my elbow caught a whole tray of sherds. They went everywhere, and I mean everywhere under the shelves and behind the sink. Spent like 3 hours on my hands and knees trying to match the bag numbers back to the right pieces. Has anyone else had a total site cataloging disaster like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

tessaperry16d ago

Oh come on, three hours? Sounds like a mild inconvenience, not a disaster. You dropped some labeled sherds, not the Hope Diamond. Labeling exists for exactly this reason - put the bag numbers back on and move on. People act like archaeology is brain surgery. It's dirt and broken pottery, not rocket science.

ray_sullivan16d ago

Tell me about it, @tessaperry. Next thing you know someone's gonna need therapy because they got a paper cut from a field form. "I'll never recover from the trauma of that sharp Munsell chart corner!" Three hours? That's about the time it takes to argue over who has to drive the truck back to the storage unit. Just grab some new bags and a sharpie and stop crying into your trowel.

stella2216d ago

Wait, didn't a friend of mine literally cry over a broken bag of auger samples? Yeah, @tessaperry, she spent a full hour trying to figure out which piece went where, and it was just brown dirt in a ziploc. Some people really do treat this stuff like it's brain surgery, lol.