so it's me again Stacey Camp at MSU campus
archaeology
i'm digging here in summer of 2020 on
service road during construction project
to put in utilities underground to
extend them here on campus
i'm in a pretty large hole underground
uh about maybe i don't know 15 feet down
10 feet down
and one of the things i wanted to share
with you is
what do we do when we're digging in this
this ash layer
this trash dump and as i talked about in
one of my other videos from this summer
you can see that there's a clear
difference between some of the
soil layers what we call the
stratigraphy in this
uh in this trench and the
light colored soil here which right
ends right here this light soil here
light
brown soil and then this dark soil
uh denotes when the trash dump
begins so this action layer
of kind of molten metal and ash
is where the trash begins and it's in
a football size dump football field size
dump
maybe larger but one of the things i
want to share
in addition what i've shared with the
other videos is what happens when we're
digging in this layer
and we find an artifact that looks like
it might be
a whole artifact like a whole bottle
instead of just you can see there's lots
of fragments here on the ground of
glass and ceramics things that are
really broken that's a
broken michigan state university
ceramic probably a bowl so what happens
in
when we find something like this so uh
if it's really really delicate like a
bone
um what we'll do is we'll take out like
a small brush
that we keep in a kit like a tool kit
and brush around it
uh and slowly remove it from
the ground uh with the bottle bottle
still kind of delicate and it can break
it can shatter so again it's really
important to keep
heavy-duty gloves on like the ones here
we have gardening gloves leather gloves
so that if it does break you don't cut
yourself
the with glass we usually trowel around
it
very carefully and remove the soil
around
the bottle and any other artifacts
around the bottle it looks like there's
a big chunk
of glass we'll also carve out the soil
around it and as i'm doing that you can
see i'm finding more artifacts which
makes the whole process a lot slower
and more tedious but we're going to
trowel around this bottle
so that it'll come out easier
sometimes we'll kind of feel it to see
if it's now ideally you go slow
and you remove all the soil around it
and if this was an excavation unit and
we had a lot more time
we'd map out exactly where we found it
as we're digging down
oh that's neat it looks like there's
some shell maybe in there
egg shell and more glass here
but because of the time constraints
because of the pandemic and
staffing for the summer that's um
we're not allowed to have large groups
of staff
on campus right now it's pretty empty
actually there's very few people
here on campus that are other than
essential workers 
archaeologists because of federal
compliance are considered
essential workers if they're needed on a
on a site like this where we
hit an archaeological find or site
so there's not a lot of us but if there
were we'd be doing things a little
differently
so we've had to improvise and kind of
change
the way we think about archaeology
because of
the conditions going on here with covid
but i'm out here
still good we're still finding things and
documenting them so
it looks like this has a little bit of
give i feel comfortable pulling it out
i really didn't have to pull it all you
shouldn't have to and here we've got a
nice complete
bottle that we carefully removed
um one of the things i look at one i'm
gonna take my gloves off real quick
cause it's not broken
just see if we can see so i'm looking
down
to see if there's a maker's mark i'll
clean it off there's lots of dirt
i'm also gonna look around to see if
there's any labels on it
doesn't actually look like this one has
a label which is kind of a bummer but
what we'll do is wash it off in the lab
see if there's a maker's mark and take a
look at how
the bottle was manufactured it looks
like it was made in a machine
probably the whole thing was made in
this machine and how do i know that i
know that because there's a seam
i can see here on the light and you
might be able to see it actually with
this camera
and um there's a seam that extends
from the bottom of the bottle all the
way to the bore which is the top of this
bottle here where my trowel is entering
the inside here and that tells me that
it was completely made in a machine
i'm not going to go into the history of
bottle manufacturing today
but early bottles were hand blown by an
experienced glass maker glassblower
and then as we get into the modern times
bottles
eventually are completely made in
machines there's a period of time
where part of the bottle is blown in a
machine or made in a machine
and the top the finish here that's what
we call the finish this top here
was hand blown or hand tooled in this
case this whole bottle was made in a
machine
so it's pretty pretty modern um
so that's how we get a bottle
uh a complete bottle out of the soil
without breaking it
