Old Dirt – New Thoughts

Stacy and Tamara identifying shellfish.

The students in my lab class are pushing hard to finish their projects. They’re all working on materials from Aniakchak – mostly the 2007 collections. They’re producing the first real data from these materials. I have students analyzing shellfish, mammal bones, chipped stone waste flakes, chipped stone tools, and bone tools. Other students are working on the catalog data and illustrations. It’s my favorite part of the class. I have 16 research assistants – all generating data and addressing questions. It’s a blast.

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I spent today messing around with photographing a basalt point from the King Salmon site. I struggled getting the lighting and the camera settings to capture all the details of the flake scars and yet still show the proper black basalt color.

Here is the end result. I’m using a digital Nikon D70s with an old 105 mm macro lens (the lens doesn’t work with any of the camera’s electronic functions). We have a pretty basic photo stand and lamp set up in our lab. I use a frosted glass plate to lift the artifacts above their shadow. For editing the images I have an old copy of Corel Photo-Paint left over from my dissertation days. I’d never stitched images together before – so I felt pretty pleased with myself that I could figure it all out.

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