Laboratory Methods in Archaeology

Course Description

Laboratory Methods in Archaeology is an introduction to the basic methods of processing, classifying, coding and analysis of archaeological material. Hands-on laboratory methods are taught utilising collections from recent field school and project excavations, and the catalog notes these materials may include European, Mexican, and Native American ceramics, glass, metal, lithics, masonry, plants and other classes.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, ANT is the Anthropology prefix and the L suffix marks a laboratory course. UWF publishes this at 3 semester hours, with (ANT2000 and ANT3101) or ANT4824 as prerequisite.

⚠⚠ The contact-hour figure here is the least certain in this batch

UWF publishes no contact hours for any course, and this one is a laboratory course carrying three semester hours, which the repository's conventions do not settle cleanly. The live corpus carries science laboratories at both 45 contact hours per credit (EVR2001L and OCE1001L, both 1 credit / 45 hours) and at 30 (CHM2045L, 1 credit / 30 hours) — so there is no single laboratory ratio to apply. The figure shown applies the repository's combined lecture-and-laboratory convention of 20 contact hours per credit, giving 60.

⚠ Treat it as indicative and confirm the meeting schedule with the department. A hands-on collections course could reasonably meet for considerably more.

Laboratory work is where most archaeological information is actually produced, and students consistently underestimate the ratio. A field season generates months of laboratory work, and the analysis, not the excavation, is what turns a collection into a result. It is also the part of the discipline with the steadiest employment, because every project generates material that must be processed and catalogued.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Process excavated material from receipt through to storage.
• Wash, dry, and stabilise material appropriately by class.
• Recognise material that must not be washed and explain why.
• Sort and separate an assemblage by material class.
• Label and number artefacts to accepted standards.
• Maintain provenience control throughout processing.
• Describe the consequences of losing provenience association.
• Catalogue material into a structured record.
• Design and apply a coding scheme consistently.
• Identify and classify historical ceramics.
• Identify and classify Native American ceramics.
• Analyse glass and identify diagnostic attributes.
• Analyse metal artefacts and describe corrosion products.
• Identify and analyse lithic material and debitage.
• Describe masonry, brick, and architectural material.
• Describe the analysis of faunal and botanical remains at an introductory level.
• Quantify an assemblage and select appropriate measures.
• Describe the strengths and limitations of common quantification methods.
• Use diagnostic artefacts to date a deposit.
• Produce basic artefact illustration and photography.
• Prepare material for long-term curation.
• Describe curation standards and repository requirements.
• Write descriptive and analytical laboratory reports.
• Apply laboratory safety and handling practice.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe conservation treatment at an introductory level.
• Describe database design for archaeological collections.
• Describe residue and use-wear analysis.
• Describe archaeometric sourcing techniques.
• Describe digital recording and photogrammetry of artefacts.
• Describe collections-based research using existing material.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Processing from receipt to storage
• Washing, drying, stabilising
• Material that must not be washed
• Sorting by material class
• Labelling and numbering
• Provenience control
• Consequences of lost provenience
• Cataloguing
• Coding schemes
• Historical ceramics
• Native American ceramics
• Glass analysis
• Metal and corrosion
• Lithic analysis
• Masonry and architectural material
• Faunal and botanical remains
• Assemblage quantification
• Limits of quantification methods
• Dating from diagnostics
• Illustration and photography
• Preparation for curation
• Curation standards
• Laboratory reporting
• Laboratory safety

Optional Topics

• Introductory conservation
• Collections database design
• Residue and use-wear analysis
• Archaeometric sourcing
• Digital recording and photogrammetry
• Collections-based research

Resources & Tools

• Society for American Archaeology (saa.org) — free Principles of Archaeological Ethics; read them in your first archaeology course, not your last. Student membership is inexpensive.
• Register of Professional Archaeologists (rpanet.org) — free; the eligibility criteria tell you exactly what a professional archaeologist is expected to have done, including a field school.
• Florida Division of Historical Resources (dos.fl.gov/historical) — free; Chapter 267, the permitting process, and the Florida Master Site File.
• National Park Service preservation briefs and the Section 106 guidance (nps.gov, achp.gov) — free, and this is the process most professional archaeologists work inside every day.
• Florida Public Archaeology Network (fpan.us) — free public programmes and volunteer opportunities across the state; an unusually good route to real experience for a Florida student.
• Florida Anthropological Society and its journal — regional research, and a genuine route into the state's archaeological community.
• Get to a field school. It is the entry requirement for professional work, it is what employers and graduate programmes look for first, and nothing substitutes for it.
• Diagnostic artefact type collections and online references — the Florida Museum and several state programmes publish free ceramic and historical artefact type guides; a type collection in your hands is how identification is actually learned.
• Your programme's comparative collection — the single most useful resource in this course, and it is sitting in the laboratory.

Career Pathways

• Anthropologists and archaeologists — SOC 19-3091.
• ⚠ Cultural resource management is where the jobs are. The great majority of professional archaeologists work in compliance archaeology for consulting firms, agencies, and tribes — driven by Section 106 and state equivalents rather than by research funding. Plan for that rather than for academia.
• Field technician ("shovelbum") — the entry-level role; project-based, travelling, and the standard first job after a field school.
• Crew chief, project archaeologist, and principal investigator — the CRM progression, with a graduate degree generally needed above field technician.
• State and federal agencies — State Historic Preservation Offices, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
• Tribal historic preservation offices — a growing and important sector.
• Museums, collections management, and curation — SOC 25-4012 and 25-4013.
• Historic preservation planning at local and state government level.
• Postsecondary teaching and research — SOC 25-1061; requires a doctorate and is highly competitive.
• ⚠ Be realistic about the entry conditions. Field technician work is seasonal, project-based, frequently far from home, and modestly paid; benefits are inconsistent. Many people do it for a few years and then either move up, move into agency or museum work, or leave. Knowing that in advance is better than discovering it.
• A graduate degree is effectively required to advance beyond field technician in this field — plan the pathway early.
• Laboratory technician and collections assistant — steadier and more predictable than field work, and a genuine route into the discipline for people who prefer not to travel constantly.
• Collections management and registrar roles in museums and repositories.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Provenience is the artefact's meaning — and the laboratory is where it gets lost

• An artefact separated from its provenience is close to worthless for research. The object survives; the information it carried — where it came from, what it was with, what layer it was in — is gone and cannot be recovered.
• ⚠⚠ Most provenience loss happens in the laboratory, not in the field. Bags emptied together, a tag left in the water, an unlabelled tray, two contexts on one table — every one of those is an ordinary mistake that permanently destroys information a field crew spent weeks producing.
• Work one context at a time and clear the table between them. This single habit prevents most of it.
• ⚠ Never separate a bag from its tag, and write labels in the medium the laboratory specifies — pencil on the right paper survives washing; ink does not.
• Check the tag against the bag before and after every operation, and treat an ambiguous or damaged tag as a stop rather than a guess.
• ⚠⚠ Do not wash everything reflexively. Material with residues, charred remains, some bone, corroded metal, and anything intended for chemical or residue analysis must not be washed — washing removes exactly the evidence a specialist would have used, and it is irreversible.
• Ask before doing anything irreversible. Cleaning, consolidating, and re-bagging are all decisions, and a laboratory assistant who asks is worth more than one who proceeds.
• Record what you did to the material, not only what it is. Conservation and analysis later depend on knowing how it was treated.
• Catalogue consistently. An inconsistent coding scheme makes an assemblage unanalysable, and consistency matters more than the particular scheme chosen.

⚠ Curation is the end of the process and it must be planned from the start

• The purpose of processing is to produce a collection someone can use in fifty years, not to tidy up after an excavation.
• Use archival-quality materials. Ordinary bags, boxes, and adhesives degrade, off-gas, and destroy what they contain — the wrong plastic bag is a slow-acting hazard.
• ⚠ Metal, waterlogged organics, and unstable material need specialist handling and stable environmental conditions; bagging them like ceramics will destroy them.
• The catalogue is as much the collection as the objects are. A box of well-preserved artefacts with no usable record is not a research collection.
• ⚠⚠ Repositories charge for curation, and many are full. Curation must be funded and a repository must have agreed to accept the material before excavation begins — see the curation note below.
• Digital records need curation too, and they are more fragile than the artefacts. Formats become unreadable and media fail; plan for migration.
• Deaccessioning is not a solution, and the ethical constraints on disposing of archaeological material are tight.
• Existing collections are a research opportunity. Publishable work on already-excavated material costs no new destruction — and it is exactly the kind of project this course qualifies you to do.

⚠⚠ The antiquities market, human remains, and the curation crisis

• ⚠⚠ Do not buy, sell, or appraise antiquities. The professional societies' ethics principles treat commercialisation of the archaeological record as incompatible with the discipline, because market demand is what funds looting — and looting destroys context, which destroys the information, permanently.
• An artefact with no provenance is frequently a looted artefact, and authenticating or publishing one raises its market value and rewards the destruction that produced it.
• ⚠ Human remains require consultation, not just permits. Descendant communities have legitimate authority over the treatment of their ancestors, and the discipline's history here is genuinely bad — remains were collected, measured, and retained without consent for well over a century.
• Consult early and continuously, not at the end. Consultation presented as a formality after decisions are made is not consultation, and it is recognised as such.
• Treat remains with the care you would want for your own relatives, including in photography, in storage, and in how they are discussed.
• ⚠⚠ The curation crisis is real and it is the discipline's quiet failure. Repositories across the country are full; excavated collections sit uncatalogued, inaccessible, and in some cases deteriorating, and some institutions will no longer accept new material. Curation is expensive, it is permanent, and it must be funded before excavation, not after.
• Budget for curation in the project, and confirm a repository will accept the collection before a trowel goes in the ground.
• Existing collections are an underused research resource. A great deal of publishable work can be done on material already excavated and never analysed — and it costs no new destruction.
• ⚠ Archaeology has been used to support political claims about land and identity, sometimes disastrously. Interpretations carry consequences beyond the discipline, and stating the strength of the evidence honestly matters.

⚠⚠ Archaeology is heavily regulated — and most American archaeological work exists because of it

• The National Historic Preservation Act, and particularly its Section 106 process, requires federal agencies to consider the effects of their undertakings on historic properties. ⚠ This is the single largest driver of archaeological employment in the United States — the great majority of professional archaeologists work in compliance, not academia.
• The Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) governs archaeological resources on federal and tribal land, requires permits for excavation, and makes unauthorised excavation, removal, and trafficking a federal offence with substantial penalties.
• ⚠⚠ NAGPRA — the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act — governs human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. It creates consultation and repatriation obligations and it changed the discipline profoundly. Understand it as a legal requirement and as an ethical correction to a real history, not as an obstacle.
• ⚠ Florida: Chapter 267, Florida Statutes vests authority in the Division of Historical Resources and declares archaeological resources on state-owned land and on state-owned submerged land to be state property. Collecting from them without a permit is unlawful.
• ⚠⚠ Florida section 872.05 makes it a felony to knowingly disturb an unmarked human burial. Unmarked burials are common on Florida sites, and if human remains are encountered, work stops and the process defined by that statute is followed — this is one of the most important things a Florida archaeologist knows.
• The Florida Master Site File is the state's inventory of archaeological and historical sites; recording sites into it is a professional obligation, and consulting it is the first step of any project.
• State and local permits, and tribal consultation, apply on top of the federal framework.
• ⚠ Metal detecting and surface collecting are restricted on public land and prohibited on many sites; a hobby elsewhere is an offence here.
• ⚠ Rule 11 applies. Preservation law, regulations, and tribal consultation requirements change — verify with the State Historic Preservation Office and the relevant agency rather than relying on this guide.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — and it is live across this prefix, most of which sits at the upper-division levels.

ANT4180L is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida. ⚠ The contact-hour figure is the least certain in this batch — see the note above and confirm with the department.