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Can we talk about the museum volunteer in Tucson who told me to stop brushing dirt off my finds and wet them instead?
She explained that dry brushing scratches pottery glaze and that a spray bottle of distilled water with a soft sponge keeps the decoration intact, then my 1,200 year old Hohokam sherd came out with red paint still visible, so now I want to know if anyone else got this same tip and whether it backfires on bone or shell.
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the_viola7d ago
The "spray bottle of distilled water with a soft sponge" tip is real and my buddy swears by it too. He digs out near Florence and had a plain brown sherd that looked like nothing, then he misted it and a whole black-on-white design showed up. But he tried the same thing on a chunk of burned bone from a site and it went soft and crumbly on him, like the water just ate it. Shell is even worse from what he told me, the water pulls out salts or something and it starts flaking apart. So water is great for pottery and iffy for everything else, best to test a tiny spot first lol.
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