Still here, still learning more!

Time to dust this off again!  It's been a while since we've written anything here.  Plenty's been happening, though!  We've moved the whole La Belle collection into one area of collection storage (it used to be in three rooms), and put it into new cabinets.

Clean!  Each of those cabinets has its own set of artifacts, organized by material.  Ceramics, leather, glass, iron, lead, bone... there are a lot of artifact materials!  If we took a picture turned around from this shot, you'd see a set of shelves with even more artifacts - mostly the ~5,000 pounds of lead musket balls the colonists brought along.

The other thing I've been doing that takes most of my time is working on the upcoming La Belle book.  It's going to be a gargantuan book that takes a look at most of the artifacts on the wreck and attempts to describe and interpret them.  With almost two million artifacts plus the ship itself, that's a lot of work.  Obviously, I'm not going it alone (or anything like alone!) but it's still a ton of work.

To try to clear up some of the remaining questions, we've been doing some new research.  Some of that includes sending the pigments (colored powders) off to be analyzed for their material composition, and some of it includes recreating some 17th century explosives.  More on all that soon - I promise.

Expect a new post on some featured artifacts really soon.