Handbook for Basic Archeological Specimen Processing

This handbook is designed to outline procedures for processing specimens brought into this laboratory. It is based upon more than a dozen years of experience with these specimens and is intended as a guide for processing of a maximum quantity of items within a minimum of time. It is specifically intended to provide the processors in this laboratory with a written guide to their duties and with written instructions as to how to perform each of the many specialized tasks that arise in processing these specimens. Our workers are expected to use this handbook continually in the performance of their duties. For this reason it contains considerable direct instruction. This is doubly necessary because methods and techniques established here must also serve when specimens are processed in the field by temporary workers who seldom have had the previous experience of this kind. Consequently this is not a museum manual. The instructions in it are designed to fit the physical facilities and to meet the processing problems of this one particular laboratory. If it has application in other laboratories, in useums, or in any other context of facilities and processing problems, that is fine, and we hope that it will have, but that is only incidental to the main purpose for which this handbook was prepared.