I’ve been working on our collections recently, and had a question
which I hoped someone out there may be able to help me with!
When I began the work few of the objects had accession numbers.  I’ve
been assigning numbers using the three part    year.collection.item
   system (eg 98.04.01) and everything was going fine until I
discovered artifacts from an excavation which took place on site here.
Along with some of the more interesting objects such as military
buttons and coins, there are hundreds of pieces of ‘junk’ eg tiny
shards of glass, broken pieces of nails etc. I don’t want to have to
give a separate number to each item, but I don’t know of  any
acceptable alternative. This is the only archaeological collection we
are ever likely to have - we don’t store collections from other sites.
We had considered giving all archaeological objects the year number 60
 (which will be difficult to mix up with other year numbers as we
opened in 1990 and plan to change to a four digit year number in the
year 2000). Then give each type of object a collection number (eg all
glass given the number .01), only giving an item number to
‘interesting’ pieces - such as those with manufacturers marks.
What system do other people use for cataloguing their archaeological
collections? I would appreciate any suggestions!

Thanks!
Heather.





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