So… my next assignment on my archaeology course is to practice sorting and classifying. because we are not expected to do actually digging and yet we have to practice skills and techniques exercises have been devised which anyone can do without even stepping outside their front door. The course I’m on is a MOOC (massive open on-line course) from Brown University and I’m really enjoying it; it has really enliven my interest in archaeology and focussed my interest.
So this exercise to practice organizing material – I guess out in the field it would be organizing your ‘finds’ – consisted of emptying your bag or a drawer or some other collection of random items and then to sort them in four different ways. I started with a drawer of the sideboard first of all but there was so much stuff in it that the exercise would have taken for ever and would have had a very long and boring write-up as there were so many items. This was a lesson in itself; if I were really digging in an artefact rich area it would be better to examine small areas closely rather than be overwhelmed by a large area with lots of ‘stuff’.
I thought about doing my desk here where I work (which could do with a good tidy – or organise!) but it is mostly paper and again there is so much of it. So I emptied my bag onto the floor and there was a selection of different items, which made classification for the purpose of the assignment much more straight-forward. We had to classify our items into four groups and then reclassify them into four different groups, and we had to do this four times.
So classifying my junk:
- important to me, not so important, hardly important at all, rubbish
- one colour, two colours, more than two less than five colours, multi-coloured
- paper, food, plastic, mainly metal
- over a year old, acquired in the last year, acquired in the last month, acquired in the last week
There were about 20-25 items altogether which i thought was a fairly modest amount, especially since some of them duplicated (pens, till receipts, postcards) compared to what most people (i.e. men expect to find in a woman’s bag… I quote a WordPress friend:
I must admit that I have in the past appropriated this word (Tardis) when referring to the contents of a woman’s handbag. What looks on the outside to be something the size of an A4 folder can contain the entire Soviet navy, the city of Tokyo, every key and lighter that was ever manufactured, several rainforests worth of paper hankies and, for some unknown reason, a hairy, decades-old sherbet lemon! Go on, tell me I’m wrong! ;.D
(Have a look at his blog – he takes the most amazing pics!)
Lois Elsden 