At the start of the semester, I started my internship with the Anne Arundel County Archaeology lab for the Lost Towns Project. I was very excited because this would be my first time getting hands on experience in archaeology and preservation techniques. The Archaeology lab is located in historic London Town in Edgewater, Maryland. This made me even more excited because I had gone there for a field trip back in elementary school. I learned that the group works with collections from all over Maryland and that there is a lot of collaboration between the archaeology teams in Maryland’s counties.
My first day was filled with clay pipes and a little bit of recording. By recording I mean that the lab has a database software that houses all of the artifact information. My job was to enter all of that paper information into that system. That was where I started to learn more about the different types of artifacts (colors, techniques used to create them, ect.). Each kind of artifact has its own cleaning process, but most of them only require some brushing off or being scrubbed with some water. In the case of the clay pipes, they needed the dirt scrubbed off with water and the dirt on the inside forced out with a needle and pipe cleaners. At one point while cleaning out the inside of one pipe, I got a little too forceful and poked a hole in my finger like with sowing. Oops! You might be wondering why cleaning out the hollow insides were so important? Turns out, the boreholes are used to figure out the time period from when they were made (they shrink a little bit over time!).
I was surprised at how laid back the environment was and how straightforward the process is. I am the kind of person who over thinks everything, so it was nice to start with something simple. Overall, I enjoyed my first day and I’m looking forward to what happens next!
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