The Best Way to Spend a Friday: Archaeology Conservation Lab

I have just discovered the perfect way to spend a Friday afternoon, reconstructing broken ceramic vases.  That's right, spending a Friday afternoon taking intentionally smashed clay pots and piecing them back together.  All in the interest of archaeology.

  Our fellow Masters student instructor
The instructors at our Archaeology lab arranged the workshop, in order to give us MA students the opportunity to complete a conservation project from start to finish all by ourselves. On site, most of the artifacts are usually considered so valuable that they are not given to lowly Masters students, so this was a fun, consequence-free way to get our hands dirty.

First we glued the pieces together slowly, letting each piece dry

Then, in order to plaster the missing pieces we all had (as you likely would on site), we placed balloons within he pottery to form a base upon which we could plaster.

   Marija blowing up her balloon within the pot

 balloon = placed.

getting ready to plaster

My balloon would not be pushed within the pot, so it got a special belly-button plaster job...

Post removal of balloon...

 After being sand-papered with three different grained sand papers

Yigit's plastered pot.

We got a little caught up analyzing the shapes of our missing shards of pottery.  South Carolina plaster?

Haribou bear, anyone?

Cleaning the pot of excess cotton and plaster...

then it was time to paint the pots.  We were instructed to paint them a color that matched our original pot, but I wanted something a little different, so I went for a more purple-y shade, in case I should ever not be able to tell which piece was plastered!

bitti!