Wednesday, August 8, 2012

What does a registrar do??

Just about everything . . .
AD - queen registrar!

 We are very lucky to have AD with us full time this season as our excavation registrar.
Drying pottery awaiting the magic AD touch
What is a registrar? what do they do? A recent job description for a registrar states:
This needs some AD help!
- Develop procedures to review and verify object numbers, provenience and culture information.
- Research, verify, and correct object number problems that have been identified (improperly assigned suffixes, multiple objects with the same number, etc.).
- Research, verify, and correct object cataloging problems that have been identified (incorrect description, culture, geographic origin, etc.).

that doesn't even begin to cover it!

AD in action
But they (or at least AD our registrar extraordinaire) does so much more. This season (and in the pre-season) AD designed and implemented a filemaker pro database, brought us into the 21st century by lending us her ipad for fieldwork, she keeps the troops happy with pizza nights, she puts the water out (with ice) for the field every morning, she keeps the lab running along smoothly and makes sure that everything that comes in from the field is cataloged, recorded, washed, bagged and tagged, and labeled. And that's all before breakfast.


Sometimes they come to the field and help out with the excavations, or in this case helping out with the remote-controlled plane runway. Who knew what you could do with a law degree ???


Happy pottery markers!






 The key to a well run project is an organized and efficient registrar - we are so lucky that AD is on extended "sabbatical". THANKS AD!  We couldn't do it without you. 

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Closing Trench CC


Trench CC came to a close yesterday for the season, and in true Trench CC fashion, it has left us with more questions then answers. 

There have been a number of interesting finds and some new architecture in the newly opened square. We've had two pyric structures in the current cultural  layer that we are ending with. 

The first was maybe a hearth or oven like structure, and the second which I worked on, was maybe a paved floor of some sort. The structure was first spotted by one of our sharp-eyed high schoolers,  M. 


When looking at the aerial shot of CC, you can see the hearth-structure at the beginning of this paved structure. 

As the excavation of this structure continued , a small amount of orange and red sediment appeared under the mudbrick holding the paving stones together. This area was labeled, and we continued excavate around the area. Right next to the pavement area, and may have been apart of the pavement structure at one point, there appear a huge amount of this red-orange-yellow sediment under the mudbrick.
 

It's really quite artistic, looks almost like a Van Gogh painting. 


Not much is known about this colorful sediment but it has been seen sparingly in other trenches under features. This large sample will be floated and hopefully upon further excavation next year, we will be able to figure out what purpose this brightly colored sediment served!


The Cool Crew

Monday, August 6, 2012

Chalcolithic Curiosity

It was pretty amazing to watch Curiosity land on Mars as I was processing finds from over 5,000 years ago.


Curiosity's first image from Mars from nasa.gov