Season's Greetings

 

Wishing one and all a safe and happy holiday season and all the best in the new year. 2012 will see significant changes at Sustainable Archaeology, as we populate the new building at UWO with equipment and complete renovations at the McMaster facility.Our database will be fully functional by early next year and we'll start receiving collections by spring.

Object to Information Conversion & Wet Lab

 

The Object to Information Lab is a lonely place right now. But in a few months, this is where our data-input crew will be sitting, as they enter raw data about the artifacts submitted to the facility into the digital database. The room will house 3-5 workstations that we expect will be kept busy. The wet lab is for processing ceramic and petrographic thin sections of archaeological and geological material, and we anticipate our research associates at HD Analytical Solutions will be making good use of the space to process their microscopic slides.

Database development

Work has been steadily progressing on the digital relational database. The database developer has produced a beta version of the platform and data entry forms, which will be revised and polished over the next several months. The aim of the database is to provide a digital record for each of the artifacts that will be stored in the facilities. Some records will include 2D photographs, others 3D images. All diagnostic artifacts will have their own DM code that will be used for both tracing the artifact to its location with the SA facilities and accessing its file within the database from a hand-held scanning device.