Cleaning Pottery

We found a LOT of pottery in the Ashkelon dig and it was all dirty having been buried for thousands of years.In order to be properly identified the pottery needed to be cleaned. 

Every afternoon the students and volunteer would gather in the pottery yard to wash pottery, clean bones and other artifacts. As we collected lots of pottery it took a lot of people to carefully wash each piece. Here is what that process looked like. Each one had a small bucket of water, a finger nail brush and boxes of pottery that had to be kept with their tags. 

This was also a good time for informal conversations with other diggers so we usually grouped in circles like this to talk as we worked. The vacant space in this picture is where I pulled my seat aside to take the photo.