by Bernard K. Means, Director of the Virtual Curation Laboratory (VCL)
Today’s animation is a pottery fragment recovered archaeologically from the Peck 1 site, a Monongahela village site located in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. It was excavated by a Work Projects Administration (WPA) crew from October 13, 1936 to January 29, 1937 and under the direction of Edgar E. Augustine. This artifact is now in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
Scanning at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
This particular sherd was radiocarbon dated as part of an effort to determine the ages of Monongahela villages excavated by the WPA in Somerset County (Means 2005, 2007). The research potential of museum collections is shown by what we have been able to learn from this otherwise mundane fragment of a ceramic vessel.
Means, Bernard K.
2005 New Dates for New Deal Excavated Monongahela Villages in Somerset County. Pennsylvania Archaeologist 75 (1):49-61.
2007 Circular Villages of the Monongahela Tradition. The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.
Virtual Curation Museum 