Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Lithics Move Complete!

At 10 am Saturday I met three brave interns in my office. We were about to embark on an epic journey: moving the lithics collection. For our purpose, we include in lithics the chipped stone (arrowheads, scrapers, and flakes), ground stone (manos, metates, pestles) and natural history pieces (selected fossils and geological specimens). All totaled, we had about 7000 pieces of rock to move.

And we did it in two and a half hours.

The move went very smoothly and now the compactor storage has something in it.
Lithics Move Complete

Most of the 7000 pieces were in the form of very small and relatively light chipped stone. Despite the small size of each piece, all 7000 take up a goodly amount of space.
Lithics Move Complete

The most difficult pieces to move were the very large metates. In particular the piece in the bottom left of the photo below - it took three of us to lift it 5 inches onto the flat dolly. I am not sure that it will be moving again anytime soon. Most of the rest of the material we moved will be unpacked into drawers in the compactor across the aisle from them.
Lithics Move Complete

And yesterday the freezer for the isolation room was delivered! It's very large and has hanging baskets just inside the top. It's also lockable to prevent small children from crawling in... or maybe for security purposes.
Shiny new Freezer

We're making progress!

2 comments:

May said...

Looks great!

Unknown said...

This blog is great. Thanks so much for posting your response about sharing the storeroom packing experiences on the RC-AAM listserv. That's how I learned about your blog. I once had to move a museum collection in a town in upstate NY in the middle of several snowstorms, so I do understand when you get excited about your progress. Please continue to share!--Shannon O.