Working at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Archaeology Lab has been a great experience, I learned more in this one semester than I could have ever imagined. Every day in the lab is something new. I learned that archaeology is not just digging up old things that people made and used, it’s about interpreting, caring for, and processing all of the artifacts the right way. There is a process for everything that has to be done, and it is important to follow this process step by step in order to meet curatorial standards.
The Hill Country State Natural Area was the project that I got to work on my first couple of days in the lab. It consisted of a few perfect dart points, but mostly hundreds of pieces of debitage. I had to go through and write the trinomial and specimen number on each individual piece, some of which were about half the size of my pinky nail. It was very hard and tedious work but also therapeutic and enjoyable and very exciting when I came across a full point.
I have also done a lot of work with the library during my time at the archaeology lab. I had to put books away and also enter works into the online catalog for the library. When entering it in the computer you must put title, author(s), subject, year published, publishing company, and a few words describing the work.
A couple of days were spent helping Stephen sort through the Hueco Tanks Chupadero black-on-white pottery. He is doing a project at the archaeology lab that correlates with the work he is doing in his graduate program. These was a lot of fun for me, getting to look at the designs and try to figure out if any pieces fit together or which part of a pot they might belong to. I also spent a good couple of hours reading over the Hueco Tanks site which was fascinating and very entertaining to learn about.
The San Jacinto Site that I worked on was the first group of artifacts I got to label and store all on my own. The artifacts were taken from a private property adjacent to the site; a private contractor went out and performed the excavations for Texas Parks and Wildlife. It was a very small project and only took me a couple of hours but there were a lot of cool artifacts, including hundreds of bullets and shells, wagon wheel bearings, and buckles. I had to label each artifact, write a small label to be put in the bag with the artifacts, and fill out the lot forms for each lot stating what was found within.
Bastrop State Park is my favorite site I worked on. There is a specific site within Bastrop, called the Rylander site, packed full of prehistoric dart points. This collection has the most plentiful complete dart points, spears, scrapers, bifaces, drills, and utilized tools out of any site I worked with.
Other projects that I have worked on consist mainly of entering sites into an Excel spread sheet. Each specific location within a site has its own spread sheet. On these sheets you must enter the following: Lot, Artifact Number, Artifact Type, Specific Artifact, Horizontal and Vertical Provenience, Depth below surface, Date of excavation, Name of excavator(s), and additional comments regarding the artifact. It is an extremely tedious process, but is necessary for when individuals go back and work with artifacts within a site.