Working at the direction of Mary Beaudry at the Spencer-Pierce-Little Farm
in Massachusetts, I once used a shop vac to remove soil from between the
stones in a tightly set cobblestone floor from an Eighteenth-century
scullery.  We "vac-ed" by excavation unit, working with brushes and dental
picks while sucking up the matrix.  The vac caught the soil in a cloth bag,
which we retained for very fine screening later.  Those samples caught a
number of very small artifacts, I remember copper pins particularly, which
would have been lost even to 1/8" screens.

The technique, when applied for specific purposes, produces much more than
really cool photographs.  Given the "dustbuster" battery powered vacs
commonly available now, one could systematically build Vac Sampling into a
research design, even on a phase III in a remote locale.  The wisdom of this
would be driven, I believe, by the research questions one addresses.

Cheers,
Tim


On 12/4/03 12:15 PM, "Carl Barna" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Do folks make an attempt to cover the open hose end with cheesecloth, or
> does that defeat the intent?  If not, then I guess you vacumn everything in
> and the empty the bag in the lab?
>
> Carl Barna
> Lakewood, CO
>

*******************************************************************
Timothy James Scarlett
Assistant Professor of Archaeology
Program in Industrial History and Archaeology
Department of Social Sciences
Michigan Technological University
1400 Townsend Drive
Houghton, Michigan 49931-1295 USA
Tel (906) 487-2359 Fax (906) 487-2468 Internet [log in to unmask]
MTU Website: http://www.industrialarchaeology.net
SHA Website: http://www.sha.org  SIA Website: http://www.sia-web.org
*******************************************************************
"The significance of an activity must be sought in terms of its whole
organization, which is more than the sum of its separable parts."
     -- Raymond Williams, 1961.