Dear colleagues,

I'm in agreement with Mohammad that we should avoid labeling bones as much as possible, especially permanantly. Introducing inks and lacquers to organic remains is contrary to the value of preservation. Being of the new generation of archaeologists I've worked with assemblages that were excavated in the somewhat distant past, labeled permanantly, and placed in storage for a decade or four. One in particular had been labeled with Indian ink and 20 percent of the labels were illegible because the ink had smeared, run, were blotted out with more ink to try to correct labeling errors, or the texture of the bone was innappropriate for writing on. Another was a large assemblage of delicate bird bone tools, the labels were an offense to the ancient craftsmanship. Additionally, labeling is time consuming and that time would be better spent working carefully and making sure not to associate bones with the wrong catalog number (that can happen while labeling, too). But, whether to label or not depends on the characteristics of the collection and what questions are being asked of it. We can't be certain of the technology or interests of future archaeologists, but I think in the "deeper future" they'll be wondering why we vandalized artifacts.

 

Ciao,

Rhea