Reentering Jackets

     On week one I spent an hour and a half in the lab and on week two I spent three hours. During this time I worked on the both the large and small Jane jackets. A lot of the work was very time consuming but minimal, like the small piece of bone that I removed almost all of the caliche from in the pictures below. It felt really good to get back into working with these jackets, which I hadn't worked on in a little while. I was able to take some of the cleaning techniques I'd learned or improved on since I was last cleaning them and put them to work. I think this next step in cleaning these jackets will be the most time consuming of all because I will have to do very minuet work over a long period of time to see it pay off, but I think it will be worth it. And the bones sure are pretty when they're clean, just look at that small bone fragment I cleaned in the pictures below!

Removing Bones

     Last week I spent three hours and forty five minutes in the lab. During this time I got out the big Jane jacket and decided to go back to working on it. I'd been meaning to ask David about photographing the upper bones so I could remove them, and he was there so I was able to do that. I took the photographs myself, using the jacket tag for scale, and was finally able to remove some of the bones. Typically we try to leave as many bones in the jacket in place as possible until we're completely done cleaning, but in this jacket there was a line of bones on top of more bones. Because of this I had to clean the upper bones and then remove them to get to the bones underneath. I did this by wrapping them in tinfoil the same way they were situated in the jacket, and lightly vinacing together any pieces that I could tell fit together. I was very excited to get these bones out and to continue removing dirt underneath them. Now it's just a matter of time until I can see all of the bones in the jacket, which is very exciting!