Photo of soaking
A dirty business.  Crew members soak excavated soils in buckets of a bubbling brew of water and baking soda. Soaking was necessary to break down the hard clay so that it could be washed through screens to recover artifacts, animal bones, shells, and other materials. The trick was to keep all the buckets from each excavation level together so that they could be screened as one unit. Each group of buckets was tagged with information on where it came from in the site. In this way, all artifacts could be traced back to where they came from.
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