October, Archaeology - Hands-on with artifacts

[Alaine Kensington]

After the previous biology class, Alaine had wiped the board and moved some of the tables into a cluster at the front. The students that remained after the previous class were asked to either sit a bit further back or pick up a chair to sit at a slight distance from the table cluster, which was probably the better option. She exited the room, and shortly returned with a large crate, containing all sorts of things. She started displaying the things on the tables.

There was a handful of pottery sherds in all shapes and sizes and colours, some awls made of bone, a small clay figurine packed in a plastic bag for safety, a replica of a rusted sword, a box full of shiny coins, two large and quite hefty bricks. There was also a wooden spoon, and a complete juglet in cream with black stripes. The last few things she lifted out of the crate was a leather sack, which was full of bits of flint, non-worked but nonetheless interesting, a flint handaxe, a stone chisel, and a piece of basalt grinding stone. It was that last one, aside from the two bricks, that made up the blunt of the weight of everything.
She exited the room again, then returned with a few pieces of bent and dried wood, looking fairly old.

"Good afternoon again, then. Today we're going to have a look at several things I've gathered up during excavations and private trips in Europe. Most of these items are genuine, though some of the coins and the sword are fake. Those are valuable objects that need cataloging in a museum. What we're going to do is look at each of these, determine their materials, which should be fairly easy, and then we'll discuss what kind of use they have been."

((I'll see if I can get a list of images that you can fumble around with, should be doable.))

[Ada Turing]

"Are we going to need gloves?" Ada asked, reasoning from her only previous knowledge of artifact-based science. (CSI)

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

Aurora tried to suppress a squeal of excitment but failed. She scrambled across the room for a closer look at the pieces. As her hands were prosthetic, she hardly had a need for gloves, so she dismissed Ada's comment as she reached for one of the potsherds.

[Alaine Kensington]

((Ok, I've assembled the list of goods))

Three ostraka
Two large sherds of Navajo pot
A piece of Saite Egyptian pottery
Near-Eastern Ubaid sherds
Glazed Medieval British sherd
Complete Halaf jar
Large rusted sword replica (center one)
Bone awl from Chumash Indians
Bone awl from Nineveh
A figurine from Tell Ubaid, Syria
A flint handaxe
Assorted flints
18th Dynasty Egyptian spoon
A very heavy grinding stone

"Well, Miss Turing, it's good you asked. Some of these objects are fragile and easily damaged, so I would like both of you to be very careful when handling them. The pottery isn't vulnerable, so you can pick those up safely, as long as you don't try to move the large jar. The figurine is very fragile, so I'd rather you don't touch that one at all.
"Another thing to be careful with are the flints, since they can be extremely sharp, and the wood, because it's brittle. Also, please keep in mind that these objects are from my personal collection, and I'd like to keep them in one piece."

She nodded at both girls before continuing. "Now, I'd like both of you to pick a couple objects, doesn't matter which, and describe them - what are they, what material are they, what function might they have had. You can pick things up, but as I said be careful about it."

[Ada Turing]

Ada contemplated one of the ostraka.

"Greek?" She asked. "To look at it, it's lived two lives: First as part of a pot or urn or somesuch, and then later, when text was scraped into it... It looks unglazed, a burned finish? No, that's not right... The detail on some of them is too fine for that. To make a wild guess, I'd say that the time between when it was a pot and when it was written on is measured in hundreds of years? It seems a bit odd to be writing what could be graffiti on what was fine art."

[Alaine Kensington]

"You're very right. These are called 'ostraka', which is a Greek word. The singular is 'ostrakon', it means shell or in this case a voting ballot. They were used to write down the name of the citizen that owned it, and they used them to vote if there was someone people wanted to banish from the city. If the vote was unfavourable, they'd be exiled, or orstracised, for ten years. At one point they started making special ceramic circles to do the same thing, but these are the originals. Pottery shards have been used to write on for a long time, since it's cheap and widely available."
"This one you have is indeed on a piece of Greek pottery, a red-figure bowl or a large jar, I think, from the curvature of it. The production process for these is a bit complicated, I think I'll go into detail on pottery production next time. It is ceramic, a relatively low-temperature firing. The shinyness is produced by polishing it, as glazing didn't truly make its appearance until about 500 or 600 AD."

Alaine explained it, and then pointed at the writing. "Now, you estimate this writing to be much younger than the shard itself? That's a possibility, but there's a much more likely one. People would just pick these up from a rubbish pile where the broken pottery was thrown in heaps, and scribble on them. I don't think they'd have to search for sherds a hundred years old to write. What's happened is that they took a fresh shard of pottery, wrote on it, used it, and then threw it away. Now, over time, this pottery will get worn by wind and weather, by plants, by chemicals in the soil, and it gets rounded off. You can feel that the edges are smooth and rounded, right? The same happens to the inscribed text. it's a damage in the surface, and the layer with the decoration starts chipping around it. that way the writing itself looks a lot older, while the rest of the image is still good."
"On the subject of fine art - that's something worth discussing. The fact that we nowadays call it fine art is because of collectors who liked the fine lines and the beautifully decorated pieces of pottery the Greeks have left behind, but who is to say that the Greeks themselves thought of it that way? It might have been just another pot to them. That's the biggest problem we have with old things, we try to project our own modern values onto them, even unconsciously. But it's good you said it. You made a nice assessment."

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

Aurora felt a bit humbled and embarrassed by the in depth conversation, idly poking at the navajo potsherd. After all that, it felt a little short to say it was reddish and jagged.

"Ooh, doggy," she murmured as she picked up the egyptian spoon. It was probably the most detailed spoon she'd ever seen, despite it's obvious age. She giggled when she imagined that the dog was actually catching a really large frisbee.

[Alaine Kensington]

"Yes, well spotted. Dogs, and especially jackals, are animals associated with the Egyptian god Seth, but in this case it might just be because it looks pretty. I don't know exactly where this one came from, but I do know it's from the 18th dynasty, somewhere in the period where the pharaoh Akhenaten threw out the entire Egyptian system of gods and replaced it with worship of the sundisk as its only god. Didn't last very long, though, only about 20 years if I recall correctly. Anyway, that makes it about 3400 years old."

Alaine smiled broadly at Aurora, happy to see that the girl had found something that interested her. "We don't know exactly what the spoon was used for, but I can assume it's for eating something. The fact that there's a dog on the handle might indicate that it was used for a kind of ritual though. Can you tell the material, Miss Robinson? That should be obvious, I think, but it's still something I should ask."

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

"It's wood, right? I don't know what kind though. Professor Shiyal told us to look at the different trees to try to tell the difference, but that was mostly just on bark and leaves, and even then I didn't do very well."

She seemed to turn her talkativeness on and off like a switch, as her talking suddenly ceased for several seconds before ending with, "What do you think these marks are? Was someone chewing on it too hard? Maybe that's why they use metal spoons now so people can't chew on them really hard."

[Alaine Kensington]

"Indeed, wood. Honestly, I'm not that much of an expert on it myself, but in Egypt the choices for wood are very limited. They had palm wood, which I think this is, and they imported ebony from further North, from current day Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. Also, nice of you to notice the marks. They're not chewmarks, actually. something being chewed on leaves different marks, it would make the wood be rather bubbly and uneven. This is most likely damage caused by time, by sand pitting the wood. It could even have been insects eating nibbles out of it." With a smile, she continued. "We use metal spoons these days because they're less breakable, and because they're easier to make. Most spoons today are cut out of sheet metal and bent into shape. They're more durable, mostly. And it's not very nice to have splinters in your mouth, right?"

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

"Oh! Like george washington, right? Who had wooden teeth? He probably got lots of splinters."

She walked over to the two awls. "Are these also made of wood? Like driftwood?" She'd seen a few peices at the beach which looked pretty similar in terms of wear. They were even white like some kinds of driftwood she'd seen.

[Alaine Kensington]

"Actually, thse are made of bone. They used the footbones of cattle or deer to make awls like these. Usually they're split into two, so you'd have one of the rounded ends as a handle, but you can see this one hasn't been split and has two of the round parts. Those would have been on the toe side of the foot. It was very common in early times to use bone as a material for tools, since it's quite sturdy and still easy to carve into shape. Also, people would use everything they had, so when they had to slaughter an animal for its meat, they could also use the bone for tools, tendons to strong string or glue, fat for cooking and later also soap. it's incredible what you can do with everything found in animals. These days we have metal and plastic for so many things, we can hardly imagine a world without it."

Alaine proceeded to answer questions about the different items she had, and explained about them as much as she could to the two students. "Now, I see we're almost out of time already. For next time, I'm giving you both a pottery shard, and I'd like for you to draw it, at a 100 percent scale. What I'd also like you to do is guess the diameter of the pot it was from, based on the curve of it, and try to imagine what the pot looked like. For the drawing, I'd like to see a prontal view and a cross-section, without breaking the shards. That'll be your excercise for next time, when we'll start on pottery in specific."

(( OOC: sorry, I have to start closing this class so next semester can start. ))