Museum basement sorting gone sideways in 2019

I was cataloging sherds at a small museum in Ohio when a shelf gave way, dumping 40 labeled boxes across the floor. Took me two weekends to re-match everything, and I found three pieces that were misfiled from a 1987 dig. Has anyone else dealt with a full re-sort after a storage accident, or is my luck just special?

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mason.paige27d ago

Holy crap, that sounds like a nightmare. My buddy had something similar happen at a library archive, not with sherds but with old maps. A pipe burst and a whole shelf of rolled maps just slid right off and got all mixed up, plus water damage on like half of them. He spent a whole month trying to match the catalog numbers to the physical rolls, and some of the labels had smeared so bad he had to ID them by the style of handwriting. Found out later that like five maps were labeled wrong from the 90s, so he basically had to redo the whole system from scratch. I think he still has flashbacks when he hears a pipe creak. Your two weekends sounds rough but honestly way better than his month of hell.

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