Visit to Sustainable Archaeology: McMaster

Last Friday, our team here at Sustainable Archaeology: Western took a road trip to visit Sustainable Archaeology: McMaster in Hamilton, Ontario. We met with Dr. Aubrey Cannon and Meghan Burchell of the McMaster facility to discuss the development of Sustainable Archaeology's database, and the integration of the collections held physically at the two facilities in London and Hamilton into the centralized Informational Platform. 

From left to right: Kira Westby, SA: Western, Dr. Aubrey Cannon and Meghan Burchell, SA: McMaster,
Dr. Rhonda Bathurst and Dr. Neal Ferris, SA: Western. Photo taken at the McMaster SA facility.

As mentioned in previous blog posts, the labs and storage repository of Sustainable Archaeology: McMaster have been integrated into a renovated facility that is part of McMaster Innovation Park. Like Sustainable Archaeology: Western, the McMaster repository space is outfitted with high density mobile shelving units, and will store materials in the same green archival-grade polypropylene boxes as the Western facility. The two facilities will follow the same policies and procedures for storing and managing collections, using archival-grade packaging materials to ensure longevity and research viability of collections. Although held physically in two different facilities, all collections held by Sustainable Archaeology will be incorporated into the single database system and research platform developed by Sustainable Archaeology, allowing broad access to these materials.

 

Sustainable Archaeology McMaster lab spaces are designed to enable focus on materials analysis, including petrographic, biogeochemical, zooarchaeological and geoarchaeological studies. The facility has a processing and wet lab (seen below), where artifacts, faunal and floral materials, as well as soils and sediments are processed, and where materials preparation and analysis can be performed, as well as a microscopy and analytical lab space that incorporates a number of powerful microscopes, used to facilitate study of micro-artifacts and to produce high resolution digital images. 

Over the next few months we'll be working closely with Sustainable Archaeology: McMaster to incorporate our inventory management system, which will allow us to track and manage collections held collectively by Sustainable Archaeology at the two facilities, and to finalize our policies for collections management. We'll also be working with our database team here at SA: Western and with SA: McMaster to begin testing the collections management portions of the database.