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Dear Danielle, In the Pacific we commonly wet sieve and sometimes (bucket) float everything in the sea, including those from "dry" sites (but nothing is ever really dry in there, or at least not desiccated for sure)...and the main issue for me has been that material will almost never dry so frequently grow mold (rather than crystals) and the wood charcoal becomes too crumbly. I usually either try to rinse the sieved archaeobot material in fresh water back at the site of residency when we have running water or back in the lab, and then have everything in cloth bags (or I pierce the plastic bags if we only have those) for gentle drying. I work mainly on wood charcoal and never have had so bad consequences (fragmentation, crystals and other deposits) as to make the ids difficult - well, not more difficult than what they were intrinsically;)... I'm totally for salt-water sin:) - adaptation to field conditions! cheers emilie Dr Emilie Dotte-Sarout Postdoctoral Fellow ARC Laureate Project The Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific – A Hidden History School of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Australian National University [log in to unmask] Honorary Research Fellow Archaeology, School of Social and Cultural Studies, The University of Western Australia [log in to unmask] ________________________________ From: The archaeobotany mailing list <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Mike Allen <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Friday, 1 March 2019 2:43:14 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: salt water flotation acceptable or sin? I sieved material in the Med and floated some. Drying flots was the problem - leaving microscopic salt / halite crustal on the surface, and on slow drying growing inside some hollow of vesicular elements (charcoal and snails) fracturing them. Flushing in lost of fresh not drinkable water solved this - but non salt water was at a premium and defeated the object. we were in very shallow shallow waters. I suspected at the time (1980s) that in part the slow drying didn't help as this allowed crystallisation. But limited flotation since then in open seawater did not have same problems On Thu, 28 Feb 2019 at 14:39, Danielle de Carle <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: Dear wise heads of the archaeobotany list, How much of a bad idea would flotation be using salt water (e.g. Mediterranean)? I have found a US paper:- Lange, Frederick W., and Frederick M. Carty. “Salt Water Application of the Flotation Technique.” Journal of Field Archaeology, vol. 2, no. 1/2, 1975, pp. 119–123. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/529622<http://www.jstor.org/stable/529622>. but seem to remember that the likely salt crystal formation and expansion during drying would be an issue for fragmentation - I certainly struggle id'ing cell structure in wood when deposits have built up? - would it be enough to wash the resulting flots? what problems/successes have others had?, Any advice would be welcome. Yours Danielle Danielle de Carle ________________________________ To unsubscribe from the ARCHAEOBOTANY list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=ARCHAEOBOTANY&A=1 -- Dr Michael J Allen, MCIfA, FLS, FSA AEA: Allen Environmental Archaeology Tel 07828 103454 website at www.themolluscs.com<http://www.themolluscs.com> and Visiting Research Fellow in Environmental Archaeology, Bournemouth University Series Editor: Prehistoric Society Research Papers (http://www.prehistoricsociety.org/) Series Editor: Oxbow - Studying Scientific Archaeology and Oxbow Insights Vice President: Conchological Society of Great Britain & Ireland (http://www.conchsoc.org/) President: Lewes Archaeological Group (http://www.lewesarchaeology.org.uk/) CSCS card holder (CRO) Molluscs in Archaeology (£25) sold out in 2 months and reprinted available direct from me at £20 + p&p (but only a few copies left) available from Oxbow Books http://www.oxbowbooks.com/oxbow/molluscs-in-archaeology.html reviewed by the Prehistoric Society http://www.prehistoricsociety.org/files/reviews/Molluscs_in_Arch_PPS_review_ed.pdf ________________________________ To unsubscribe from the ARCHAEOBOTANY list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=ARCHAEOBOTANY&A=1 ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the ARCHAEOBOTANY list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=ARCHAEOBOTANY&A=1