Stop cleaning artifacts with metal tools - learned this one the hard way

When I first started volunteering at a dig in Ohio back in 2019, I used a dental pick with a metal tip to scrape dirt off a clay pot fragment. The supervisor caught me and said I'd damaged the surface texture beyond repair. Now I only use wooden skewers or soft brushes after watching a $2000 pot sherd get devalued to basically nothing because someone thought a steel tool was fine.

2 comments

2 Comments

karen_shah5612d ago

That dental pick incident still makes me cringe every time I think about it. I actually got so paranoid after that I started carrying around a pack of those cheap wooden chopsticks from takeout places to use as cleaning tools. My friends joke that I'm the only person they know who gets excited about finding a really good stick on the ground for scraping dirt off pottery. I tell them it beats being the guy who turned a Roman coin into a modern art piece with a wire brush though. Seriously, if anyone here is new to this hobby or work, just wrap a layer of masking tape around any metal tool you absolutely have to use, it gives you a second chance if you slip. Otherwise you end up like me, standing in a field explaining to a very disappointed archaeologist why you thought a steak knife would be fine for cleaning a bone.

gavin8012d ago

Wow, $2,000 just gone because of one wrong tool? That's a tough lesson for sure. I've seen folks get really cocky with metal picks on old coins and it always ends badly. Glad you passed that along before someone else made the same mistake.