Collection and cataloguing of artifacts from Zone 8 have faced a multitude of challenges including rain, smell, flood, snow, and quanitity. Every time our group has gone out to collect artifacts from the five designated areas it has rained. Smell relegated the artifacts from the lab to closets in their final stages of drying (let’s face it – wet, smelly trash in a room just makes a smelly room). The week during Thanksgiving break the anthropology building experienced a flood of relatively epic proportions; water from a burst pipe on the roof cascaded from ceilings, walls, down stairs and onto floors. Whoops. Luckily a few group members were still around to rescue drying collections. The final collections could not be completed due to the accumulated fourteen inches of snow in the Kibbie Dome parking lot.
The biggest challenge has been in the management of the quantity of artifacts collected. We have close to 2,000 items in the Zone 8 collection. While this is great for statistical analysis, the sheer volume of fragments is a challenge. We suggest that future studies of this area utilize minimal collection methods, including random sampling and in-field data recording. Additional observations of material depostion by tailgating participants would be more helpful to the campus Sustainability Center in their efforts to identify behavioral patterns and locations for recycling receptacles.
Know we know.
- MPG
