Re: [ARSCLIST] Archaeological 78 Fragments

[Steven Smolian <smolians@xxxxxxxxx>]

Never mind the issue of which is the "up" side on double sided records.

Steve Smolian

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Richter" <mrichter@xxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2004 5:57 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Archaeological 78 Fragments


> At 03:20 PM 7/22/2004 -0500, Aaron Russell wrote:
>
> >Thanks for your comments.  I realize that it's a long shot to get any
> >useful information from these fragments.   He's actually hoping to find
> >cross-mends between the sherds to build larger pieces, but they're
> >still in the fieldwork phase on this project and haven't analyzed what
> >they've found yet, which also means that they might have some larger
> >pieces and he dosen't know it yet.  I know from experience that,
> >depending on context, it could be possible to find most of the
> >fragments of an object like this (for example, if someone had swept up
> >the broken pieces and dumped them together into a trash pit).  From an
> >archaeological point of view, even getting a good guess at the genre
> >would be great information.  I also just ralized that it might be
> >possible to get an approximate idea of the position of a fragment on a
> >record without the center hole by calculating the radius from the arc
> >of the grooves.
>
> As I'm sure you understand, this is not a problem comparable with
> potsherds. That is, if a chip is missing from a pot, one can infer both
the
> structural qualities and the decorative ones - particularly if it's small.
> But filling in the 'blank' for a chip out of a 78 is quite a different
> matter. Similarly, two shards must be aligned precisely - to the same
> groove - for playback. The process is not unlike reassembling a paper
which
> has been cross-shredded - except that the 'writing' is invisible and one
> can only see the position of a line of 'text'.
>
> In my limited experience with smashed shellac, the best hope is to find
> pieces held together with the paper label - ideally, with a readable
label,
> though, I'll not give odds on that. But chips are all but inevitable under
> the circumstances and assembly for intelligible results is improbable.
>
>
> Mike
> --
> mrichter@xxxxxxx
> http://www.mrichter.com/
>