[ARSCLIST] 78 rpm fragments in archaeological contexts

[Oliver Mueller-Heubach <ommuel@xxxxxx>]

Hello
I’m an historical archaeology Ph.D. student at the College of William and Mary 
working on a paper for a material culture class. My goal is to create a 
methodology for using the 78 rpm record fragments commonly found on early 
20th century archaeological sites to help look at issues of class, race, ethnicity, 
and gender. Since it is very rare to find fragments with portions of the label 
surviving, the paper will focus on things like material composition, thickness,
edge-type, etc. I would like to produce a typology of characteristics that might 
correlate with different economy and deluxe labels, series, and date ranges. 
Ideally, I would like to find a way to read the grooves on the fragments to help 
identify the type of music.  Unfortunately, the fragments found are generally 
only1-4 cm. in size. The analog method that occurs to me is to cut a section out 
of a poor condition, non-archaeological 78 with a Dremel-type tool and then 
patch in the fragment and play, listening for the deviation from the surrounding 
song. This would probably prove difficult in terms of aligning grooves and 
identifying such a minute section of music, but I will be giving it a try. I have 
seen some reports of digital scanning and reconstruction of broken 78s and 
cylinders, but apparently these techniques are being applied to restore mostly 
complete recordings. Is  there a way that single record fragments could be read 
digitally to interpret the style of music (or even compare it to graphs generated 
by the practice of re-mastering old recordings and thus match the actual song)? 
I realize this is probably a long shot, but if there is a chance, it would be a great 
archaeological tool. 
Thanks in advance 
Oliver Mueller-Heubach