Spring Lab Work
Our final lab day for Spring 2024 was a week ago and we have just finished getting everything cleaned up and put away. Over the last three months, the North American Lab has been bustling with project staff, students, and volunteer community archaeologists. We’ve held open lab hours two days per week, during which over 30 dedicated community archaeologists put in over 350 hours of hard work helping us process the collections from the Fall 2024 excavations at the Community Education Center (CEC)!
February was spent washing all of the recovered artifacts. Because excavation happens so fast, washing everything is a real process of discovery and we identified many amazing objects that hadn’t attracted our attention in the field. Here are some photos from the washing phase (click to see larger versions):
March and April were spent sorting all of the newly cleaned objects. We carefully examined each object and assigned it a category based on material type, function, and what it can tell us about human behavior. We counted and weighed all of these objects to create a full artifact catalog, and all of our community archaeologists added important notes that will guide our future detailed analyses. Here are some photos from the sorting phase (click to see larger versions):
These are just the earliest steps of our analysis of the collections from the CEC, but we’ve already learned so much. We’ve learned about the abundance and importance of coal for heating the homes that used to stand behind the CEC…. we’ve learned that people painted their walls in a huge variety of beautiful colors… we’ve learned about some of the various ways residents of the Black Bottom cooked and ate their meals, made their livings, and entertained themselves with hobbies… and we have learned more about the violent destruction of their community. Future analyses will focus on better understanding some of these stories and our next steps will collaboratively consider how to best share them with the public in meaningful ways. We look forward to sharing opportunities to get involved with those next steps soon!
For now, we want to extend a huge thank you to ALL of the amazing community archaeologists who joined us this spring, including many Penn students as well as the following volunteers (listed in order of how many days they spent in the lab with us):
Erik Weaver
Darnell Holmes
Marina Fonseca
Frani Rehbun
Louisa Pollack Pruitt
Nandini Subramaniam (and her mom!)
Alex Seng
Lydia Parke
Marty Ferris
Jantra Morris
Miranda Mathias
Frances Conwell
Robin James
Bryan Harris
Malaika Mumeka
Merryl and Ezra Gladstone
Shaylee Kish
