This semester is coming to an end and I am glad to have participated in this URAP project. It introduced me to new methodologies in anthropology that I had not encountered previously in my courses (mostly because they were more sociocultural than archaeological). I was also able to meet other fellow anthropology majors and learn about their areas of interests in relation to mine. Although I did enjoy my experience working on both the Cheney and Gage House projects, I really wished that we could have gotten more work done on the Cheney site, but of course we were occasionally restricted by weather conditions of which we have no control over. As for lab, even though we had guidelines for how to wash, label, and bag the materials, I noticed that there was a lack of uniformity. With labeling for instance, I noticed that sometimes objects were not completely dried and clear polish would be applied that smeared the labels making them hard to read. I think this is probably because so many different people were on one bag of artifacts that perhaps people lose neglect to pay attention to the steps of the process.
A suggestion that I think might be useful to employ and help speed up the task of bagging is if a binder was compiled with various pictures and descriptions of different types of common material that tend to show up in the finds. In this way when uncertainty occurs regarding the type of material found, one can just refer to the binder before asking Kim for help. This will save on time and if Kim is not around it will be useful. Of course I understand that there are limitations to this method, but I think generally it would be beneficial.

Lin WU