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| The St. Augustine Archival Society gets a tour of the city's archaeology lab |
Last week we received a special treat: a tour of St. Augustine's
Dr. Sue A. Middleton Archaeology Center! Andrea White, city archaeologist, opened her "home" to the
St. Augustine Archival Society and gave us the lay of the land (or what's beneath it).
A lot happens in the city's archaeology lab. Everyone is interested in the digs, but 75% of an archaeologist's work is done in the lab; This includes screening,
cleaning, sorting, analyzing and report writing.
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| A St. Augustine City Archaeology volunteer explains screening and sorting |
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| Buckets waiting their turn to be screened |
Andrea was asked why the city's collection wasn't available to the public? The St. Augustine Visitor's Center currently has a city archaeology display, but most of the
city's finds are not what one would put on tour. They do occasionally get lucky and find enough large pieces to create part of a whole.
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| Mission Red-Filmed Stamped Bowl (San Marco Variety), 1726-1754 |
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| Spanish olive jar (the Tupperware of its day) |
But the vast majority of the lab's boxes are
full of cleaned, sorted and labeled artifact pieces (sherds). Perhaps not of
museum quality, but these sherds, and understanding
the context from which they came, provide archaeologists with a wealth of information.
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| ceramic and pottery sherds in the act of being sorted |
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| Just a portion of St. Augustine's archaeology lab's boxed artifacts |
Of course I had been to the city's archaeology lab before, but I had
never poked around in it. The lab is a candy store of not just artifacts
but of maps, journals, comparative collections, and zoo-archaeological
collections (my favorite!)
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| Matt Armstrong making drawer discoveries |
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| drawer of sheepshead bones for comparison |
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| large mammal collections for comparison |
Over the past 30 years, The city's archaeology lab has been housed in a couple of different locations, starting at the water treatment plant and then in the city's Government House. But the Dr. Sue A. Middleton Archaeology Center has been the lab's home since 2011 (see
FPAN blog from 2011 for more details).
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| Opening Day of the Dr. Sue A. Middleton Archaeology Center |
Andrea White became the city's city archaeologist when Carl Halbirt retired in 2017. According to Andrea, over the past 30 years, St. Augustine has acquired the "best Spanish Colonial collection in the United states"! She has a plan sketched out for the next 10 years to further protect this collection and give the public more access to it. This plan starts with updating the physical lab space and repackaging artifacts then eventually to digitize and establish a database to better track projects.
The lab is aiming to host an open house in March to show off its revamped space. (Stay tuned for the date!) I know that Andrea is excited to see what her newly purchased curation cabinets look like outside of these boxes...
Text by FPAN Staff: Robbie Boggs
Images by FPAN Staff
