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Chapter 7: Life of an Artifact
Paleolithic archaeologists over the past 100 years have dug up hundreds of thousands of artifacts. These include stone tools, animal bones, beads of stone, bone, and shell, bone tools such as awls and needles, ivory, stone, and bone figurines of animals and humans, and ground stone implements such as grinding slabs to make pigment from minerals such as hematite (red ochre). Have you ever wondered what happens to the artifacts that are excavated from an archaeological site? In this video, you can follow a stone tool called a scraper from the moment of its discovery at Pech IV until it is stored away. All artifacts at Pech IV that are larger than 2.5 centimeters receive this same treatment.
You will see the artifact discovered and its excavation using brushes or a trowel. The Pech IV crew point proveniences the artifact using the total station, bags and tags the artifact, and puts it in a bucket of similarly bagged and tagged stone tools for transport back to the laboratory. At the lab, a fresh barcode label is made for the artifact bag, the artifact is washed and labeled, and stored in its bag. One of the project's stone artifact specialists then inventories and analyzes the scraper. The artifact is photographed and its image stored in a database that can be linked to a site map showing the point provenienced location of the scraper. This particular artifact is a good example of a scraper from Pech IV, so it undergoes the additional step of being illustrated. Finally, the scraper is re-bagged and stored away in the lab. It can be easily relocated and examined further at some future date, if other archaeologists are interested in recording more information about it.
• 1. Overview
• 2. Determining Age: ESR, Radiocarbon and TL
• 3. The Total Station
• 4. Mapping and Site Taphonomy
• 5. Computers in Archaeology
• 6. Finding Cultural Materials
• 7. Life of an Artifact