Heather,
        The system I am familiar with uses both accession numbers as well as
catalog numbers.  The entire collection is given an accession number such
as 1998-1 (1998 = the year accessioned and the 1 = the number of
collections accessioned that year, it may be the first, second, third, etc.).
        Then the objects are cataloged using a numbering system independent from
the accession number.  Each object, whether it appears to be "junk" or
"uninteresting" is assigned its own number.  The advantage to assigning
numbers to individual pieces is that of documentation.  Consider loans of
part of the collection, destructive analysis, inventory and research
purposes, etc. The paper work is more concise.  Since this is the first
arch. collection your museum has, I think you will want to establish a
precendent for the accquisition of any similar material in the future no
matter how unlikely.
        The numbering system you use should compliment the excavation methods.  In
some arch. collections, each item has a provenience.  In those cases, each
item has to have an individual number for cataloging purposes.  It is a lot
of paperwork.  Some excavated objects, often historic materials, are
provenienced by unit or lot.  That may be an option for your materials.
For instance, if you have 75 glass shards from 1 unit you may be able to
assign all objects one catalog number.  I still prefer individual numbers
for research and descriptive purposes.  If the material is ever analyzed
and fully described, group numbers may become very cumbersome.

Thanks,
Rebecca Lewis


                 At 01:22 PM 9/18/98 -0700, you wrote:
>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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