[Archport] High-tech storage centers for a sustainable archaeology

[Alexandre Monteiro <no.arame@gmail.com>]

The Globe and Mail, by JAMES BRADSHAW

Sunday, Feb. 17 2013, 10:35 PM EST


Museums and other archeological repositories have a big problem, and
it isn’t the delicacy of artifacts or the difficulty of bringing
distant history to life: It’s “losing stuff,” and it happens a lot.

Losing track of artifacts and information about them is so routine,
“there is an understood attrition rate on information at museums
worldwide,” according to Aubrey Cannon, a professor of archeology at
McMaster University.

If that seems careless, think again. Collections outlast their
keepers, and new discoveries push older finds deeper into scattered
storage spaces. “It’s a very difficult thing to stop,” Dr. Cannon
says. But he’s trying – partnering with a colleague to launch a new
facility to sort and store Ontario’s historical treasures, and give
researchers easy access to them.

Since late summer Dr. Cannon and Neal Ferris, a fellow archeologist at
the University of Western Ontario, have been assembling sister
Sustainable Archaeology centres with sophisticated laboratories in
Hamilton and London, at a cost of $9.8-million. The two sites can
house a combined 80,000 boxes of artifacts, each catalogued in a
central database and labelled with radio-frequency tags so they can be
searched and tracked digitally. They are open to researchers and first
nations whose historical legacy makes up most of what is found.

Browsing the lab tables arrayed with 10,000-year-old arrowheads and
fragments of Iroquoian ceramics, or wandering the towering rows of
legal-size boxes on mechanically movable racks, one could wonder
whether anyone would shed a tear if a few were misplaced. But these
pieces aren’t unlimited, and it may be decades before experts fully
realize what they can teach us.

“The more you lose, the less opportunity there is to see patterns and
developments and history. It’s not written in the individual pieces,
it’s written in the constellations of associations among the pieces,”
Dr. Cannon said.

McMaster’s own collection only occupies about 300 boxes of the
Hamilton facility’s 30,000-box capacity. To fill the rest, the
universities will charge a one-time fee to house objects from private
cultural resource consultants that now excavate more than 95 per cent
of all artifacts in Ontario, where commercial archeology is a
$20-million-a-year industry.

The province is littered with archeological sites, including more than
1,200 registered in the Hamilton area alone, and they’re multiplying
fast. Every new development, be it a condo tower or parking garage,
must have its site assessed. If holes dug into the ground yield enough
relics, the whole site will be excavated.

What happens next is part of the problem: Under provincial rules, the
unearthed artifacts become the responsibility of the firms that dig
them up. And with purpose-built archives filling up fast, storage
solutions can turn ad hoc. “These artifacts can be scattered anywhere
from someone’s basement to someone’s grandfather’s garage to someone’s
storage [locker],” said Meghan Burchell, operations manager at the
Hamilton facility and a PhD student in archeology.

The field’s capabilities are constantly evolving. In McMaster’s lab,
third-year anthropology student Marissa Ledger, 20, handles the bones
of a 16th-century Iroquoian dog, while her fellow student snaps
microscopic computer images of them. “We’re just looking at some of
the lesions,” she explains. In 2004, a McMaster researcher used modern
DNA extraction on that same skeleton to prove the dog had had
tuberculosis and, more importantly, that this case of the disease
predated European contact.

So what’s next for the dog’s suddenly valuable bones? “It’s a good
question, and I don’t know,” says Dr. Cannon. “And that’s the point of
keeping them, because 40 years ago, when it was excavated, nobody knew
what was going to be done.”


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/high-tech-safehouses-in-ontario-bring-new-meaning-to-sustainable-archeology/article8784632/