Undergraduate Archaeology Teaching Laboratory Renovated

Over the past few months, a major renovation and upgrading of the undergraduate archaeology teaching laboratory at Berkeley has been taking place, under the supervision of Prof. Patrick Kirch. The teaching lab, first developed some years ago by Profs. Glynn Issac and Desmond Clark as a part of the Washburn Anthropology Labs in the Hearst Gym basement, had gradually become outdated and in serious need of improvement. While consisting of a large, well-lighted space, the lab lacked any computer equipment and contained only a few outmoded microscopes, a situation that did not permit the teaching of modern analytical methods in archaeology.

Complete renovation of the laboratory and the purchase of much needed new computer and analytical equipment were made possible by a recent grant of $40,462 from the National Science Foundation's Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement Program, generously matched with $60,000 in funds from the Willie G. Willard Endowment and other sources through the Office of the Provost for Research.

Prof. Kirch, who developed the proposal to NSF's Instrumentation Program, noted that a key aspect of the project is the construction of fifteen student workstations, each station equipped with a 386 PC running state-of-the-art database software, a Leitz stereozoom microscope for examining archaeological specimens, and a Mettler digital balance for weighing artifacts. The computers are linked in a local area network, so that student and faculty-developed archaeological databases can be shared.

Other items available to the students are digital calipers, Munsell color charts, and hardness kits. The shared equipment being installed includes a thin-section saw, geological sieves (for sediment grain size analyses), and drying ovens.

Fifteen undergraduates can now work simultaneously on advanced research projects with such materials as prehistoric ceramics, lithics, and faunal materials. Courses using the lab, such as Anthro 132 Analysis of Archaeological Materials currently being taught by Prof. Kirch, will also routinely draw upon the vast archae-ological collections of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology for student projects. In the current class students are developing individual research projects based upon the ex-tensive collections obtained during Prof. E. W. Gifford's pioneering excavations in the Fiji Islands in 1947.