Hi Karin,
My advice to archaeologists doing sieving in field, and when they don't have experienced osteologist with them at the site, is to sort out what is not bone and to leave all pieces that are questionable. Time is money and unexperienced persons waste a lot of time trying to figure out what is bone or not. The big bulk of stones, charcoal, wood etc. can be picked out by any archaeologist. That is a way to minimize the volume of material from the sieves without loosing any of the bone fragments. The proper sorting is done in the lab by an experienced archaeozoologist.
I have excavated at places where we had no access to water and had to dry-sieve the soil. In humid soil small vertebrae, like herring vertebrae, can become covered by soil and hard to detect. Complete drying of such soil before sieving makes the soil less able to stick to the bones and the bones more easy to observe.
Please make some experiments and write an article.
Leif Jonsson / Gothenburg Museum of Natural History
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