Goooooood morning Xplorers! Happy Friday! Welcome back to another update from LEGO TerraX, where we’re leading the future in recording America’s past… brick by brick… and artifact by artifact!
Those of you who have been with us for a minute will remember that Phase III mitigations are BIG projects and that with projects this huge in scale, we’re going to have a LOT of artifacts. Both of our guests today are heavily involved with processing, organizing, analyzing, and understanding what those artifacts are and how they inform us about the site as a whole, so we thought they’d make for a pretty good pairing here on Dig Deeper!
You read that right — this week, we’ve got not one but TWO LEGO introductions to make! First, meet LEGO Natalia! Natalia is one of our fabulous Crew Chiefs, and she has put in a LOT of time and work at the ol’ sugar mill mitigation. Natalia did a lot of the work to organize and categorize artifacts on the front end, and — spoiler! — she and the lab staff got to do a little bit of in-person collaboration! More on that in a minute because…
We’ve also got LEGO Mark in the house today! He’s the director of the laboratory here at LEGO TerraX, and we couldn’t be prouder of the work he does. Mark leads a team of laboratory specialists and technicians, each of whom has a different specialty when it comes to artifact analysis. Together, this team is working hard to process the thousands — and we mean thousands — of artifacts coming in from our sugar mill excavation.
These two awesome archaeologists took time out of their incredibly busy schedules to talk with us about their roles on this project. Each has had a fascinating experience on this specific mitigation, but they also gave us insight into what it’s actually like to work in the field and in the lab and what their different processes are like. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be an actual archaeologist with boots on the ground working on a real project, this is the post for you.
We have so much good stuff to get into today, so let’s not wait a minute longer!
Meet LEGO Natalia, the Fantastic Field Archaeologist!
Hi LEGO Natalia! This most excellent Crew Chief came to TerraX from the College of Wooster, where she studied — shockingly — archaeology. Today, Natalia spends most of her time in the field — in her own words, “I’m a digger! I like to dig,” but during her undergraduate experience, Natalia worked as a Laboratory and Research Assistant. That lab experience would definitely help her out later! Natalia is also truly passionate about public archaeology and history, which is why she made the time for an interview. Can we all say, “Thank you, Natalia!”? Thank you, Natalia!
On the sugar mill mitigation, Natalia’s job was to manage the crew of field technicians in recording each and every artifact. Remember how they’ve been excavating the site block by block? Well, they divided each block into a grid of even tinier blocks, assigned each of these to field techs, and then very carefully collected each artifact, bagging the, up or recording the larger artifacts in the field (more on that in a second!), until they’d finished the whole grid. Then, Natalia led her team to go through each artifact, dust it off, and place it in a bag with a label clearly indicating where in the grid they found it.
Meanwhile, Natalia took on the BIG job — literally. She went around the site noting what we call “oversized artifacts,” meaning artifacts that are too large to be shipped to the lab for further study. Since big, heavy items like doors, propellers, and... whatever this is are just impractical to put through the mail but we still need to record these items to incorporate them into our overall interpretation of the site, Natalia went through each oversized artifact, made sketches and took photos, noted the location and context in which they were found, and prepared all this information to go to the lab to help with their interpretation.
As you can imagine, with a project this size, this whole process takes a lot of time. Natalia told us that just block A took about two and a half weeks for her team to complete! And remember — there are 12 blocks to get through. Yikes!
And if you thought the field crew gets to finally relax once everything is out of the ground and labeled, you’d be sorely mistaken. After everything is out, the crew goes through a process called “culling.”
Culling? You mean that weird family of vampires? Is this a Twilight thing?
Sadly no, there were no shiny, sparkling vampires at the sugar mill. There were, however, many many nails, and they had to be carefully measured, sorted, and separated.
When a project has hundreds or thousands of one type of artifact, it’s just not worth shipping every single item to the lab, and the curation repositories where the artifacts will eventually be stored don’t have that much room! So, some are separated out in a process called “culling” so that the lab receives a representative sample instead of every single item. For example, because this mitigation is an industrial building, it’s no surprise that there were thousands of nails. However, because there are only so many types of nails and they were only used for so many purposes at the mill, it’s not necessary for the interpretation of the site to send all of them for laboratory analysis. So, someone — in this case, Natalia — painstakingly went through the whole pile of nails, measured each one for length and head size, noted which were bent or misshapen in some way, recorded where in the layout of the building they were found, and created smaller collections to send to the lab. That way, the lab gets to see a few of each type of nail but doesn’t waste time performing detailed analysis of the same nail over and over again!
As you can imagine, this process is pretty time-consuming too. While she was organizing and sorting every nail, Natalia kept a spreadsheet of all her data — can you imagine how big it was??
But here’s the extra cool thing: Natalia had extra help from… the lab staff! While all this was going on — lots of digging, organizing, labeling, sketching, and culling — the TerraX lab team actually got to leave their home base in Tuscaloosa, AL and travel to Louisiana to help at the site!
Seems like a good time to introduce our favorite laboratory director, right?
Meet LEGO Mark, the Legendary Lab Master!
LEGO Mark is an archaeologist and Lab Director at TerraX. Mark is a proper international archaeologist — he has worked in many places, including the Southeastern US, Caribbean, and South America! For a lot of his career, Mark has focused mainly on studying Native American history and working with Native Americans. He’s still passionate about working with our Native Tribes here in the Southeast and their history from before Europeans made contact with them (what we call the pre-Contact period), but lately, he has been focused on the historical archaeology of nineteenth and twentieth-century America and gaining more of an appreciation for historical archaeology.
On this super sweet mitigation, LEGO Mark manages the TerraX LEGO Lab where artifacts from the sugar mill are currently being analyzed. But even before the first box of bagged and labeled artifacts arrived at the lab, Mark knew the field team would need some help. So, he and his team of three laboratory specialists packed their bags and headed to Louisiana to help out!
Both Mark and Natalia were super positive about this moment of collaboration between the two teams that don’t often get to work together. While the lab staff was in the field, they were able to ask the field crew plenty of questions and get clarity about the field process and about this sugar mill in particular — what kind of building we were looking at, what different artifacts might mean, and how the pieces of this massive puzzle might start to fit together.
Of course, the lab’s work was only just beginning. Even though they were able to help start sorting and culling artifacts in the field, their real work would begin when the artifact boxes started shipping back to Tuscaloosa.
Once back at home, the laboratory team started the major legwork of analysis. You thought Natalia did a lot of data entry? Well, she did, but the lab has been doing even more! They’ve been going through each artifact, one by one, er, brick by brick, and recording as much data as possible about them.
You see, Xplorers, laboratory analysis is all about asking the W questions — who, what, when, where, and why. (Well, we pretty much have the “where” covered, but you get the point.) When the lab receives a box of artifacts, they start with “what is this thing?” and sometimes that’s a trickier question than you might think. When they find broken bits of glass, iron, brick, or other material, it can be tough to tell what things are! So, the team takes their time, records details like weights and measurements, and slowly starts to pull the data together in a spreadsheet they can use to look at patterns and form a picture of how these artifacts fit into their environment in history.
That’s a big task indeed, so it’s a good thing they had help…
Archaeology Is a Two-Way Street!
That’s right, LEGO Natalia came out to the LEGO Lab to help out! This mitigation has truly been a collaborative effort like LEGO TerraX has never been done before, and we’re hoping it sets the precedent for all future projects.
Natalia traveled up to Tuscaloosa and spent a week with the lab team doing detailed artifact cleaning and study. It was one heck of a productive week! They started by determining what each item is and sorting everything into categories, and it was in that process that they found Natalia’s favorite artifact of the whole process.
When the team was looking through their metallic artifacts, they came across an odd piece of iron. It was sort of weird and curvy… what could it be?
They couldn’t figure it out in the field, but once they properly cleaned it up and scraped all the dirt and rust from it in the lab, they noticed some letters and numbers inscribed on the bottom. They looked up the inscription and discovered that it was a patent number for a special kind of wall sconce with a retention container for the wax drippings from the candle that would have been placed inside! They found out that this lamp is a Wellington wall lamp, patented on September 25, 1877 by H. Wellington. Can you believe it? They had uncovered a nearly 150-year-old lamp!
Their discovery also brought another odd find into clearer light as well — pun fully intended. While sorting through glass artifacts, Natalia described, they found a shard that seemed to be curved like a milk bottle but with a longer neck than a milk bottle might have had. Again they asked, what could it be? But when they discovered the sconce, Natalia started thinking — like the weird little iron piece, could this have come from a lamp?! As it turns out, yes, it could! Natalia took some measurements and did a little research, and it turns out that the glass is exactly the right length and shape to be a lamp chimney. How cool, right?
Signing Off, Xplorers!
What a fascinating find, right? These intrepid archaeologists worked together — in fact, they’re still working together on this very project — to find out as much as we possibly can about the sugar mill — what it was like there, how the people there lived, and what their lives can teach us about our own. We look forward to hearing about many more super cool discoveries as the lab continues to work their way through analysis and pull their data together into a cohesive interpretation of the sugar mill site. Stay tuned for that!
Xplorers, thank you for joining us on another leg-o of this LEGO journey! We hope you enjoyed meeting LEGO Natalia and LEGO Mark today. And speaking of — thank you to Natalia and Mark for sitting down with us and sharing a little bit more about their work on this process.
Until next time, Xplorers, remember to keep Xploring!
— KB
Check out Part 1 of our LEGO Team's Adventures: