Week 13: November 11th and 13th

     Good morning everybody! This week, I got the chance to participate in some light archaeology and conservation at the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse and Museum, as we spent Monday and Wednesday collecting, cleaning, and organizing glass bottles that we found on the Pacetti Hotel property. On Monday, myself and Holly spent the morning collecting over 60 glass bottles, jugs, and jars of all shapes, sizes, and colors. For whatever reason, the small bits of wooded area that surround the Pacetti Hotel were filled with a number of unbroken bottles, jugs, and jars all dating from anywhere between the late 1800s up to the modern period, so Felipe had us scouring these areas in order to both, collect more bottles and help clean up the property for visitors. The process consisted of carefully inspecting various sections of the woods and then collecting whatever bottles or glassware we could with either our hands or a special grabbing tool. Then we collected each item and stored them in some plastic buckets since many of the bottles were filled with dirty water and mud. Once we had filled up each of the buckets, we made our way back to the museum's administration building and got started on the bottle cleaning process in the museum's maintenance workshop, For most the of the bottles and jars the process involved cleaning out the bottle with water as best as possible, making sure to rinse out any dirt, mud, or algae that had collected over the years. Then we put each bottle aside to let it dry. For a handful of these bottles, they still had their original metal caps, which had rusted over quite badly, so for those we simply cleaned the outside of the bottle and then allowed it to dry without removing the cap and possibly causing the cap to be destroyed.

    On Wednesday, Holly and I prepared the bottles, jugs, and jars for storage in the museum's principal storage room. First, we went ahead and grabbed a number of special cardboard boxes designed for storing artifacts longterm and then began to wrap each item in a small layer of protective foam to prevent any glass from knocking against each other and potentially breaking. By the end of the process, the collection of bottles took up about 7 full boxes and an entire shelf in the museum's storage. After we had successfully organized these bottles and got them stored away, we then had the task of finding other spaces in storage for the metal artifacts we had worked to conserve last week. Thankfully, many of these items had come from the storage space before we chemically treated them, so many were able to go back into their original place. However, a couple of larger items did not have space originally and so Holly and I had to carefully reorganize the storage space to make room for everything, making sure to take note of where each item was moved to. Then, to end out the day, we went into PastPerfect and made sure to add and change any items' home location so that they could be easily located in the future.

    Overall, this week was a lot of fun for me. I enjoyed getting my hands dirty (literally and figuratively) with some archaeology and I certainly felt invigorated finding interesting these interesting items. It was also another example of the differences in job requirements among curators. At a much larger museum, this sort of archaeology would probably be undertaken by a more professional archaeologist or conservator, but at the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse, the duty has to fall to people like maintenance, the curator, or in this case, interns.