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All finds
made the previous day at Gorham’s Cave are brought to the
laboratory for processing. This consists primarily of washing the
sample more thoroughly with the use of scrubbing brushes. A great
deal of care needs to be taken whilst doing this as some material
may be fragile or may preserve remains of pigments such as ochre
or may have signs of burning. All this is important evidence that
needs to be preserved.
^ Finds
are gently washed
Once washed the finds are spread out to dry in the sun. Throughout
this process it is important to keep the finds labels together
with the material as without this information- where the item was
found etc- any further study of the material would be useless.
Once dry the items are sorted, repacked and taken for marking. Not
every item is marked as this would not only be an immensely time
consuming task, but also a useless one as it is not necessary to
label every single find. It is often enough to separate finds into
batches for example all the rabbit bones from one level may be
packed together in one bag. However, this process of packing and
labelling very much depends on what the item is and where is it
found. For example a high concentration of rabbit bones in a level
might indicate that there were rabbit burrows in the cave and
given the shy nature of rabbits, this would in turn indicate that
the cave was uninhabited at this point by humans. But if the
rabbit bones we are finding have signs of burning, it would
indicate that the inhabitants of the cave were probably cooking
and eating the rabbits.
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