By studying these artifacts, even if they are broken into pieces, archaeologists can tell a great deal about the objects and the people who used them. Many of the artifacts are of common items, so they are easy to identify even if they're just a small piece. With some artifacts, however, it is harder to say what they are. We can compare them to artifacts already identified in our collection, or we can compare them to pictures in books, objects in museums, or to information on the internet. Click on the image to watch staff crossmend this artifact.
Archaeologists also try to put pieces of artifacts together like a puzzle.
This is known as cross mending. Cross mending pieces can help identify an object, or it can help show how different soil layers on a site are related to each other. If archaeologists can cross mend an object whose pieces came from similar layers in different excavation units, that would show that the layers are from the same time period, and that those portions of the site were being used at the same time. These distribution maps can tell archaeologists things that they might not have seen while digging. For instance, if the map shows a lot of nails and pieces of brick and window glass in one part of a site, it can mean that a house once stood there.