Day Fifteen

Bantenese coins

Since we had completed our excavation yesterday, we stayed in the ‘Mess’ today to start on analysis. Cherylyn and I tried our hand at analysing the metals. What is puzzling and strange about our unit is that we found many Bantenese and Chinese coins, much more than the other units excavated! Ibu Naniek joked that the room was probably previously used as a bank.

For our analysis, we looked at every single artefact and in a Microsoft Excel sheet, noted down all the information we could derive from it, such as where it was found (Which grid? Which spit? How deep?), what type it was (for this analysis it would be metal for us), what colour it is, what was its country of origin and which dynasty it came from, what was its design like, and what are its dimensions.

From all these gathered information and statistics, we would be able to form hypotheses.

We also worked on our posters for the museum. We live just across the museum housing artefacts from Banten Lama, and we thought it would be a great idea to enhance it further. Today we worked on our posters and decided to have one on ‘Past Excavations’, and ‘Ongoing Excavations’ taking place in Banten Lama, and the other one featuring a case study on our excavation at Fort Speelwijk. We also created a fun activity sheet for school children involving the artefacts in the museum!

Love,

Christabel