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Have I mentioned I have a background in archaeology? I do. Between that and the fact that I just finished reading an Amelia Peabody mystery (it was The Mummy Case if you're interested), I am finding the 2009 Dig Diary from the Brooklyn Museum especially fascinating. These entries chronicle an ongoing Egyptian dig. I found the most recent entry especially interesting as it discusses the conservation of some small finds - and uses a chemical we sometimes use in collections management, B-72. Go on, take a look!

Packing Update 2/13/2009

Wow! We're already halfway through the month of February. That puts us about 5 weeks out from the collections move. That's pretty wild. Thankfully, the intrepid interns are making excellent progress in packing. Just look at all that empty shelf space:

And the boxes are really beginning to pile up.


I would say that this room is about 2/5 to 1/2 packed. The other room has only had its lithics packed. But, as usual, I think we're making pretty good progress and will be on schedule for the move. Fingers crossed!

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.


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.


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.


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.


We're making progress!