Louis Magazzu – shares a ‘Day of Archaeology’ (07/25/13)
Normally my weekdays consist of digging features or test units underneath I-95 in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania, USA). In the two years I’ve been working there I have seen such a wide variety of materials that you never really know what to expect. This week however I’m seeing how the other half lives; I’m working in the lab getting a little taste of everything. It’s Tuesday. Jen Rankin, one of the field supervisors, asks me to set up a display featuring some of the I-95 project’s finest prehistoric finds. We walk to her cubicle where she gives me a goodie box that would excite any prehistorian. Some of the highlights include unifacial tools, bifacial blades, a broken atlatl weight, a handful of pot sherds, some clay pipe fragments, two tiny beads, dozens of projectile points of diverse types and materials, and finally taking center stage is a beautiful gorget of burnished slate with incised decoration broken rather neatly into two pieces. I go upstairs to my case, clean it, and lay a black table cloth inside. At lunch I get a phone call from Kevin Donaghy, a Temple University graduate student whom I have been helping out on Saturdays on his site at the Revolutionary War battlefield of Brandywine (Pennsylvania, USA). He excitedly tells me he thinks he’s found something important. We are going back this weekend to check it out. After lunch I place groups of artifacts on slabs of timber, place labels with each artifact type, and put a few sketches in the case showing some objects as they would have originally looked. The case is complete but there is still a bit of space on the surrounding desk. I take a bag of some experimental stone working fragments and set up a display showing successive stages in lithic reduction from chert cobble to several different blanks that might become projectile points or bifaces. Not a bad day of work.
Louis Magazzu
URS Corporation
Burlington, New Jersey USA
by admin