I finally hit 1,000 hours in my local museum's dig lab and I'm weirdly emotional about it

Jake Rivera · 2026-09-23T18:55:04.834192+00:00

So I volunteer at the natural history museum here in Boise every Saturday doing lab work on stuff that comes out of a site up in the Owyhee mountains, mostly sorting screen residue and washing pottery sherds. Last Saturday I logged my 1,000th hour in the lab and it honestly threw me, because when I started three winters ago I figured I'd last maybe two visits before they got sick of me. The thing that got me was what came out of my tray that same day, a tiny copper alloy pin about the size of my thumbnail, and the archaeologist said it was probably from around 1,200 AD based on where it sat in the layers. I've washed maybe 4,000 sherds by now and almost all of them are just brown rocks with no story, but that one pin made the whole thing feel real. It also made me realize how much I still don't know, because I couldn't even guess what culture made it until she explained it to me. For folks who volunteer or do lab work, did you mark any kind of milestone, or did it just sneak up on you? And how do you keep from getting bored during the slow weeks when every tray is just gravel?

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I finally hit 1,000 hours in my local museum's dig lab and I'm weirdly emotional about it | Archaeology Discoveries - Rigidtalk