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Update: the 'ritual artifact' label on a carved bone from a dig near Flagstaff is driving me up a wall
I volunteer at a small museum here in Flagstaff and we got a collection of animal bones from a site dug back in 2011, and almost every weirdly shaped piece got labeled 'ritual artifact' by whoever wrote the cards. One piece is a deer toe bone with a neat little groove cut around it, and I keep seeing people online call it a ceremonial object with zero testing. Here is the thing, I spent two weeks comparing it to cut marks on butchered bones from the same site, and the groove matches tool marks from skinning, not carving. A zooarchaeologist I emailed at Northern Arizona University looked at my photos and agreed, she said it is a processing mark, not a symbol. So now I have to go rewrite 9 catalog cards and explain to my supervisor why the old labels were basically guesses. It bugs me because bald assumptions like that spread fast and then get cited in papers as fact. Has anyone else had to correct sloppy catalog notes from a legacy collection, and how did you break it to the people who wrote them?
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