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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
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