Lab photo update

The students are working on their projects and Jessica is making progress on cataloging the collection from the Davenport Pottery site dig.

Max and Allison are cataloging their pottery frags and getting ready to start their cross-mending study.


Frank is studying the charcoal we recovered from our flotation of sediment samples. He hopes to describe the Davenport family's choices for fuel use when firing their kiln. He's examining little chunks of charcoal with an optical microscope.


This week I also taught the students the basics of archaeological drawing, drafting, and illustration. We learned by drawing two random objects from the stuff that I keep around the lab for activities just like this. This year we drew a mini-terra cotta warrior, lent to us by Pat Martin, and a model of someone's thumb.

Jeremy was doing a measured drawing using drafting tools.

After working with measured drawings, we also used digital photographs as tools to produce our drawings, but still working free-hand. I taught them stippling, a standard technique for technical illustration. Alison is drawing the thumb in these photos.

This photo and drawing are of the same thumb, but don't show the same view. You'll notice that the light falls from the left in the photo and the right in the drawing. This drawing was by Jessica Beck and was her first attempt to anything like this!

The students didn't finish any drawings, since these objects were just for exercises. If anyone ends up drawing objects in their project, we'll post the final drawings here. Over the summer, we also did technical drawings of the pottery in the Utah State Parks collection. Perhaps we will post some of those drawings as well.