Montpelier: Lab Day!

Reflecting on the week I spent at Montpelier in Orange, VA as part of their Archaeology Exploration Program, Thursday was my favorite day.

We were blessed with perfect weather for the five day program. Not a drop of rain. Not a temperature above 82. Blue skies with puffy white clouds. All week I was afraid to jink anything by saying that.

Thursday was a planned indoor day. After Steve's Civil War Tour, we were scheduled to be in CALM, the Community Archaeology Lab at Montpelier, the place where our week started on Monday morning. I had flashbacks to July 2019, the month I spent doing archaeology in Israel at Tel Kaisan. By week two it was deemed I was not a good fit to be in the field. I could not get the sand floor clean enough for their photos. I was not strong enough to wield their pickaxes. I was the only one on the expedition to NOT find an artifact. Any artifact. The rest found so many artifacts many were left behind in a spoil heap until the next year. 

But I thrived inside the lab, back at "the house." The last three weeks were spent washing pottery, labeling pottery, photographing finds, communicating with the Arabic women hired to help process everything, and any other jobs that needed to get done. I felt useful. 

I had the same feelings on Thursday at CALM. Liz gave us a brief into into which artifacts get dunked in water (ceramics, glass, slag, and rocks), which are dry brushed (iron, copper, other metals), and which are quickly dunked (mortar, bone, and shell) lest they disintegrate.

As we were down two people who had to leave early, the six of each had our own stations.

I've been told for every hour in the field, another five hours are needed in the lab to wash, process, log, and research the finds. Washing is only one step. Montpelier has found three million artifacts so far (and counting). 

Our process was to wash, brush, and leave on a drying rack for three days in front of a humidifier. Thought of washing artifacts in Israel where all we did was leave them out in a sieve for a few hours in the Israeli sun, then bundle them up for our expert from Germany to study in greater detail.  

I also thought of washing artifacts at Newlin Grist Mill (NGM). They use school lunch trays and old newspapers and leave them lying around the dirt covered house. We are grateful for running water. 

 

Montpelier was definitely on a different level.

Each cloth bag had smaller plastic bags inside separated by type of find. Ceramic, glass, etc. Bones and fragile items are often inside a medicine bottle for extra protection. After they are dried, the items are catalogued, including being measured and weighed, and guesses made about their intended purpose. Then they are stored. Iron is stored in plastic tubs on this main floor of CALM, other items are in external storage places, including an old barn. 

After washing artifacts for a couple of hours we broke for lunch. A few of us sat on the back porch sharing plans for our next adventures.

In the afternoon we were offered the opportunity to do some water screening. Dan, an archaeology buddy, has created a small, portable water screener using PVC and bottled water. This is the same tool, but on a larger scale and connected to running water. We were sent outside to make our mess. 

Water screening washes the soil away from botanical, seeds, grit, and artifacts so tiny they would be lost in a 1/4 inch screen. The first bucketful of each level is set aside to be water screened. This made Martha and I frustrated as there was at least one level where we only dug about a bucketful. This denied us our fun of sifting. Something we have become experts at doing at NGM. 

Here it was fun. It is very Zen. Someone said it gets tiring after three to four hours, and I don't doubt that. Percy, Janice, and I only screened for about an hour. 

We lined a barrel with mesh to catch all the good stuff, then covered it in an unending stream of water. We encouraged the items floating to the top to go to the drain where they were caught by a net. We collected charred wood and other botanical finds. The fancy word for what we were doing was paleoenthnobotany. Afterwards the archaeology team would study it closer to see what seeds appear in the samples, what wood burned, what crops grew. The grit will be sorted. All sorts of data can be extrapolated by experts. It would have been cool if we found beads or pins, but alas our finds were agricultural in nature.

The archaeology team said you either love doing this or you hate it. I enjoyed it.

Other more durable archaeology artifacts are power washed. Some random materials are hosed off.

The lab team also checks to make sure the materials already in storage are not decaying, or becoming rusty. They also write a lot of reports and are in charge of keeping track of items on loan. Us volunteers were spared from those tasks.

That day I washed many small bags of artifacts with a great variety of items including nails, slag (can't avoid slag on this trip!), pottery, bones, and glass. Martha had much slag. She also washed one of our few finds brining the experience to a full circle.

Frannie had many, many nails. I helped her
when I ran out of items to wash. She finally asked for something else. We'll never get nails clean enough through dry washing only. At some point they are sent out for a deeper cleaning.

The archaeologists were surprised we completed their backlog of artifacts. They also seemed surprised that we helped with clean up at the end of the day. Our team of eight were hard workers.

Later that day I mused about our group of eight. None of us were locals. A point I realized that night when I met a local couple who participated in a similar dig a couple of years ago.

Bethany and Bill, high school educators, traveled from Indiana

Ed, a retired Methodist pastor, traveled from West Virginia. This was his fourth program, thus earning him a permanent name tag and a purple tee shirt.

Percy, retired military, he has lived all over the world. Currently working on his PhD and involved with a dig site in the Middle East. I wish I had learned more about that, and how to connect with him to see if I could join in the future.

Frannie, originally from Pittsburgh, now living in Baltimore. The youngest of our group. I think she is in education, too.

Janice, 72, her sixth program. Lives in Vancouver and drove herself cross-country to participate. She was last here a week after the lab's 2024 fire.

Martha, 71, from Pennsylvania. We know each other from NGM and roomed together.

It was a nice group. All of the archaeologists (a variety of years of experience, including some interns) were kind and generous in their patience with all of us and sharing their knowledge.