Basic Lab Activities

Archaeologists carry out many observations on their finds while still on-site. Once archaeologists have brought artifacts and other materials, such as sediment samples, back to the lab, however, they can usually carry out much more detailed work.

The variety of laboratory activities ranges from simple cleaning, sorting, labeling, and counting of artifacts through water-separation of plant remains from sediments and microscopic examination of tool edges to chemical, metallurgical, and isotopic analyses. Many of these activities require specialized training or expensive equipment, leading archaeologists to send some of their materials to the laboratories of non-archaeological colleagues in geology, chemistry, or physics departments, for example. Despite this variety and compartmentalization, all participants in the archaeological enterprise, from lithic analysts to palaeoethnobotanists and archaeometrists, share a common set of analytical problems, methods, and vocabulary. These commonalities are not always obvious, in part because of the way universities train specialists, but they are still important. Archaeom-etrists specialize in what might seem to be highly technical aspects of dating deposits or analyzing the chemical and isotopic characteristics of artifacts, for example, yet they still rely on basic archaeological units of context and basic archaeological artifact types, and they are still contributing to the solution of basic archaeological problems. Here, the focus is on laboratories for this basic work.