How to Bag and Tag

Here is a step by step walk through of the Archaeology Project:

First, I start with a bag containing all of the artifacts recovered in a lot:

Next, I take out everything out of the bag:

The bags usually are grouped by type of item

Then, I line each artifact up in lines of five, so that I can keep a count of how many tags to make and make sure that I don't misplace the extra small pieces:

Insert Rain Man joke here

Using the master tag from the lot, I copy the information onto each new tag:

Once those are done, I generate catalog numbers for each item based on the year they were excavated, 1995, the lot they are in, and the individual item's new number in the lot:

So this piece will be item 4, in lot 176

 After the tags are finished, I start putting the tag (catalog number facing out), and item in the appropriately sized bag:

Almost done!

After everything is tagged and bagged, I put all of the individual baggies from the lot into a larger bag so that Kevin can enter them into the database.

Here is me hard at work!

Some of the items, like the bandaid, seem like they are not very worthwhile to bag. The lots that I worked on today had a ton of rocks in them. Kevin tells me that these rocks are important because they have a bit of mortal on them and were probably early foundations of Gibbs dwellings. I guess anything modified by humans was removed from the site.

This looks a lot like a normal rock collection

There's some history on this rock

Today, I worked on this project for eight hours and managed to get about 19 lots finished. The most common things I came across today were rocks, shards of glass and lots of burnt wood. So many pieces of burnt wood! The problem with the wood is that when the excavator initially bags them, there may be one or two pieces, however, after having been stored for twelve years, the fragile carbon has broken apart into dozens of small fragments. Each one of them needs it's own bag and tag, and the wood accounts for most of the work I end up doing. Like the balloon, I'm not quite sure why each small piece needs to be saved, but I'm sure that in the future the wood will be analyzed and be able to tell researchers important things about the way the Gibbs lived. I'm not quite sure what the important things are, but I'll ask Kevin next week and report back with his answer. My guess is that the wood is able to tell historians what types of trees were in the area and where the family did it's cooking, and therefore, its living. We'll see though.

Next Monday is going to be very exciting because we are all going to tour the Science Museum of Minnesota's collections and I am really looking forward to being able to talk to the curator about the various temporary exhibits and the things the museum does. My ultra dream goal of the trip is to see some old 19th century medical and science equipment. That would be super super cool!!!!!!!

Tour of the Collections!!!

Today was a great day for taking pictures, so in this post, I'll give you a photographic tour of the RCHS collections and a few of the really interesting/cool looking pieces!

So here we start looking in to the left from the door:

The shelves on the left are for the medium sized objects that haven't/won't be put into boxes. (Because they are too big or cumbersome I think...)

Items like these:

I love old tins

Driving goggles (they remind me of The Coon from South Park)

Sweet pulley

Lauren loves these traps

Beautiful boots

Super fancy canes

That's a nice inscription

To the right are the large items like farm equipment and household furnishings. The metal shelves contain large textiles like wedding dresses and things that have either broken off of the large items and need to be returned, or things that need to be identified.

Looking to the right from the door:

The black shelves on the left are the large item storage and against the wall are the shelves that hold the boxes filled with pieces that are small enough to fit in them. These are filled with dishes, small textiles and assorted household items. The desk area is where Kevin, Lauren and I work. The white rolls are the hated quilt racks...

Yuck

Here are some of the large items:

The spinning wheel I added pieces to

I'm guessing D. D. Mayne was the lord of a manor

One of the many ploughs

The infamous chair with no legs that is a candidate for deaccessioning

Pretty winter sleighs

This piece is one of our favorites. Kevin named it baby hoe and we have not been able to figure out what the heck it was used for. Our current, best guess is that it was used for scraping out debris from the nooks in farming equipment:

It's tiny!!!

With a super long and thin handle

This is our epic work space:

Where the magic happens

Here is my partner in crime Lauren!

Lovin the hooks

I mentioned in a previous post that Kevin had pulled aside items from the archaeology boxes to display in an exhibit. Here are the pieces we chose:

That's a bone, not a stick

I enjoy Kevin's sense of humor

So that's where I'm working!

The Lost Post

So when I first started blogging, I created an account using my LUC email instead of the Gmail, so when I went to write my new post, I forgot that I had used my LUC email. Basically, I had written a pretty good description of what I did my first few days, and didn't know where to find it, however, I just found it and wanted to post it here:

Day One

So my first day was pretty amazing. It looks like I won't have any set project, but will get put on whatever needs to be done that day, which suits me just fine. The more varied experience I can get, the better.

My job today was Textiles.

The Ramsey County Historical Society, or RCHS, recently had to move most of their collections out of their old storage facility, and into a new one. So, today, I had to unpack the boxes of textiles from the move and make sure that they were repacked properly for long term storage. A few of the items were folded up a lot to fit into the boxes, so I transferred the larger items, like dresses, to larger shelves. It was pretty sad to see the way that silk pretty much shatters with age along creases. Hopefully my careful efforts will help preserve some of the items, we'll see. Lol.

A few of the items I came across were really interesting. The two most notable, were a "bust enhancer" and a lace doily with swastikas. Unfortunately, I am not able to take pictures of the artifacts, but I'll try to find pictures that resemble what I found today as closely as possible.

The bust enhancer was a single flat piece in which one stuffed front pockets with lord only knows what, and then put in one's corset. It always strikes me that no matter how much "progress" and "innovation" there is in fashion, people always want to look fairly the same as they did 200 years ago.

This picture isn't the one that I found today, but it's a similar idea. Mine was just the back piece, like a flat insert, and the breast pockets were empty so that you could put as much boost in them as you wanted.

The swastika doily was a bit weird, because it was totally unexpected. Here I am, sifting through flowers and the usual lace patterns, when BAM. Nazis. It just shows how there really were Nazi pockets all over the US in the 30s and 40s. I think it's easy to forget that the Nazi movement began as a legitimate political movement, and then became something twisted as it spun out of control. It brings up interesting questions like what would have happened had it not been Hitler and Goebbles in power? The doily really makes me think about all of the people who believed in the Nazi movement before the concentration camps. It makes me wonder what my life would have been like in the 30s. Would parts of my family been Nazis? Would some of my friends? It's interesting to think about.

Again, this isn't the actual lace, but it looked just like this, with a bit more work above the swastikas. All pretty and such.

It'll be interesting to see what I do next week. I believe I'll be doing more textile repackaging, but we'll see!

July 18th

This week was back to the usual bagging and tagging of artifacts. However, Kevin asked for some help finding really cool artifacts that could be displayed in a case representing the 1995 Gibbs farm dig. It was really fun to dig through all of the boxes and try to find items that seemed like they would appeal to the public and still display a majority of the items found at the site.

Here is a picture of what the items look like after I have them sorted to and ready to be put into their individual bags:

That's the balloon!

So each item gets it's bag and you can see a few finished bags in the top center. Usually, I'll have about 10-40 of them lined up ready to be bagged for each lot. Because it can be so easy to mix up the artifacts and make a mess of the workstation, I meticulously arrange all of the bags on my left by size and line up the finished baggies on my right. I'll have to take a picture of the full work space and post it next week.

Here is a fork that I pulled aside for the display:

It had a wooden handle

I was really excited when I came across the fork. Lauren grabbed a bunch of other forks that were in the collection in order to see if there were any matches, sadly, this guy is all alone in the world of cutlery.

This is a button that Kevin really likes:

Hawkey!

This button is really cool because Kevin isn't quite sure what it is from. He believes it is non-military, but other than that, it's a total mystery. 

I really enjoy all of these pictures, so here is a random ugly harlequin quilt picture:

Gross

Lauren and I were really tired and out of it all day, so we slowly trudged through our projects and listened to music. Towards the end of the day, Kevin told us a few really weird and difficult riddles that involved midgets, dead people and eating pigeon. I ended up getting a lot done, but it wasn't a terribly eventful or insightful day other than finding good pieces of rock with mortar, a fork, a button, some glass, some pottery, some nails and other things that will be put into the case.

Lauren and I did talk for a while about our upcoming tour of the Science Museum on the 30th and what we thought of the various temporary exhibits. I'm really excited to talk to the curator and ask her about the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit and why she thinks it did so poorly, and ask her about the current Real Pirates! exhibit. I am really curious how the attendance for it has been because I absolutely loved it and think it was a fantastic blend of education, fun and artifacts. I'll probably have lots to say about the tour after the 30th. Hopefully I'll have some more pictures too!

July 11th!

So I wasn't able to get a post up about my day on the 11th, but it's probably better that I'm writing about it later on, because it was quite the day.

I got to work at 8 as usual and started the archaeology project. I didn't come across anything too out of the ordinary. Just the same glass shards, burnt wood scraps, rusty nails and pottery shards. I ran out of the catalog tags so I had to go to the other building to get more from Mollie. While we were waiting for them to print out, we started talking about our future trip to the Science Museum where we'll get to hang out with one of the curators. I mentioned that I really admired the work of the curators at the MN History Center. Mollie then emailed both of the men involved and asked them if they would meet with me! I have emailed the man that will be in MN before I move back to Chicago, so we'll see how that goes!

After talking to Mollie, I went back to Metro and worked on the arch project until noon when we had a collections committee meeting. About seven members of the committee made it to the meeting, and it was really interesting to see the political aspect of collections being played out. First, Mollie presented new items to the committee in order to determine whether or not they should be added to the collections. There were some really cool old St Paul Club magazines, photographs, paintings and train memorabilia. As Mollie presented each item, she described the donor and what the historical value was to Ramsey County. The main concern of the committee was how would the item be stored and how much space it would take up. It was a little disheartening to hear the merit of items come down to this concern, but it is understandable. It's hard to imagine many more items fitting into the storage facility.

The next main topic discussed was deaccessioning, or the legal removal of items from a museum or historical society's collections. Deaccessioning is a really difficult and  labor intensive process because there is a ton of paperwork to be filled out to make sure that the donors, or the closest people alive to the donors, know that the historical society is removing their object from the collection and why. In the past, a museum in Minnesota changed their focus and had to remove a big portion of their inventory, however, they didn't do it correctly and were shut down. Therefore, Mollie stressed to the committee that while the deaccessioning was really important, it needed to be done very carefully and very meticulously. She estimates that it will take around 8 hours of work and research per item in order to properly remove it. A large part of the work goes into trying to figure out who should receive the item if the donor does not want it back. The most desirable situation is to give the item to another historical society or museum that it would be more relevant to. An example of this is an old 19th century buckboard that says "Artichoke County, Big Stone Lake, MN" on it. Obviously, the buckboard would be more appropriately kept at the Big Stone County historical society than Ramsey. Other items, like a char with no legs and a barrel that is similar to the other seven barrels in the collection are a little bit stickier. It is possible to legally sell items that have been properly deaccessioned, however, this creates a bit of a moral problem. Is it right for RCHS to sell an item that was given to us in the hope that it would be preserved and presented to the public? The committee strongly believed that many of the items without a clear direction should be "put up on eBay and sold by the interns". This suggestion was not warmly received by Mollie and will most likely not be used. It was a bit upsetting to see these items so carelessly dismissed as something that could be sold for $5 at a garage sale. However, I feel more secure in the future care of the items because Mollie very much respects their importance and I am completely sure they will all go to loving homes where possible. Some of the things, like a chair with no legs, will truly need to just be thrown away. As I discussed earlier, not everything can or should be saved.

This week was not as exciting in the way of looking at artifacts, however, it was very cool to see the political workings of a historical society and how carefully a curator needs to interface with their committee and board.

What I'm Doing

Hi! So at the beginning of the summer, I started an internship with the Ramsey County Historical Society in St. Paul, MN. I have one fellow intern, Lauren and a supervisor named Kevin.

At the beginning of the summer, Lauren and I started working on a textile project in which we unrolled large textiles, like quilts, tablecloths and sheets from quilt racks and then rerolled them after double checking their database information. It was a really tedious and frustrating process, but we finally finished it last week!

Lauren and I are currently working on separate projects until we start our next joint effort. I have really taken a liking to the Archaeology project. What I do is take all of the small artifacts recovered from the Gibbs farm and put them in baggies and give them inventory numbers that Kevin can then enter into the database. It's really tedious, but I love it. It's really relaxing and sometimes I come across interesting fragments like balloon and bandaids. As Kevin keeps telling me, archaeology is trash. It's an interesting way to look at it because he is right. The things that we are finding in the ground would have been considered garbage in their time. Things like charred wood, broken mortar, broken pots and shattered glass. Yet while they were trash at one point, they are now considered valuable fragments of the Gibbs family history.

However, my time in the collections department has really made me think about just what exactly is history, and what is truly worth being preserved? Two weeks ago, Lauren and I unrolled and rerolled over a dozen tables clothes, all identical save their dimensions. It really made me wonder why these tablecloths, that didn't look more than 40 years old, were being saved. I'm sure my grandma could find something similar at a garage sale. What makes a piece history? What makes it worth saving? What makes this tablecloth worth the resources? The tissue paper, the time Lauren and I spent rolling and documenting, the time Kevin will spend entering them into a database, the space they take up on the quilt racks.

While some things seem like they are not quite special enough to be saved, we always come across really amazing textiles. This quilt, it was spectacular:

Supa Coo

The really cool thing about it was all of the names embroidered on it that they considered important: 

Huzzah for Garfield!!!

So while the question of "What is an important artifact?" has not been answered on a grand scale, it's things like this quilt that really make me appreciate the time, effort and resources people are dedicating to their preservation. We'll see what other artifacts I find next week that make me want to tear out my hair or sit and view them for twenty minutes.