Thursday, August 12, 2010

Making Sense of Pieces

Mending is one of my favorite things to do. We use a glue that will dissolve with acetone if need be and a sand box to support drying artifacts.

The units around the Burch House have yielded a large number of mendable artifacts. Usually we can fit 2 or 3 sherds together, but lately we have been reassembling nearly complete vessels! The stoneware pan is one example. The finished product has only 2 little spaces for missing sherds.



This wine bottle was a bit more difficult, since the glass is thin in places, but it was worth it to see it go from a big pile of green glass, to a recognizable object. By mending artifacts we can measure the volume of vessels or have an object ready to display.

1 comment:

Scott said...

Once mended, can you tell how something may have broken based on a point of impact? Usually cracks radiating from a specific point may indicate a point where the vessel impacted the floor or another object...