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!

Freezers: Not just for freezing food anymore

The museum has a freezer. In fact, we're going to get a bigger and better freezer in our new facility, but this little freezer is doing okay for the time being.


Um, okay, so we have a freezer. That's kind of boring. But why does a museum have a freezer? For hoarding microwave dinners and popsicles? No! For Integrated Pest Management!

Some bugs eat the kinds of things we keep in museums: fur, leather, paper, glue, horn, pretty much anything. But spraying collections with chemicals can be bad for the objects, not to mention the staff, so most museums use an IPM approach. IPM tries to be environmentally friendly and use methods other than pesticides to control potential infestations. And one of those methods is freezing (.pdf).

Freezing an object once will kill many pests. Freezing an object twice will kill most larvae/eggs. And that's what I did recently - sent this mystery box through a freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw cycle.


The box is wrapped in two layers of plastic sheeting and masking tape. The barriers should prevent condensation from occurring on the object (which is Not Good) - condensation should instead occur on the outside of the barrier. And not all objects should be frozen either. Anything painted, metal, glass, and teeth are among the objects which should not be treated in this manner.

But what's in the box? Well, I'll get to that on Friday - I think this post is getting long enough.

PS: I've spruced up the sidebar with some new widgets. What do you think? If you know of some great widget (or better ones than I've found), let me know!