OUR ANNUAL LAB SUMMER SCHEDULE
Every summer from June 1st to September 1st, we're on summer schedule, may have the spectrometer down for maintenance, are often out of the lab, out in the field, or out of the country, and may be slow in turning around XRF-related projects. We'll post the details here every year as the summer months grow closer. During the summers, however, the hydration lab is open for business as usual. Normal turnaround at the hydration lab, however, is a bit slower than usual this summer - we're very backed up with hydration projects and artifacts here and you'll need to be more patient than usual until the fall.
NOTEWORTHY LAB CHANGES FOR 2013: A QUICK EXPLANATION OF WHAT'S GOING ON AROUND HERE
In preparation for an extremely demanding project schedule for 2013, we have very reluctantly suspended (for now) three of our long-time laboratory programs:
(1) Provenance studies of fine-grained volcanic (FGV) artifacts.
(2) Our annual lab grant for graduate students.
(3) Discounted analytical rates for graduate students.
The bottom line is that we simply have too many artifacts to analyze and too little time in which to get it all done. Something had to give and we finally decided to throttle back on the three programs above for now so that we can still maintain the quality, thoroughness, and timeliness of our analytical work of the lab. We'll revaluate the decision in late 2013 and will update you then.
In the meantime, we'll continue to update the FGV Source Catalog and will complete any graduate student and FGV projects that we've already begun. Thanks for your understanding and please let us know if you have any questions.
EXPANDED ONLINE RESOURCES AT THE U. S. OBSIDIAN SOURCE CATALOG
We're now in the process of gradually expanding the obsidian source information that's available through the U. S. Obsidian Source Catalog and are systematically adding individual source descriptive information and literature reference lists. Also please note that the individual state obsidian source maps will now be accessible directly from the state source lists. As we add this information to the lab website, we'll also be making the transition to web-based support for the source information that is now summarized in our lab reports. With this change, the obsidian source information will remain current and we'll be able to be more comprehensive in our review of the literature and our descriptions of individual sources.
Once that's finally completed, we'll begin filling out more detailed information for all the individual obsidian sources and will eventually compile the whole works into a single volume. This will take some time so please be patient!
