A typical excavating day would begin with the removal of surface earth in wheelbarrows. As large objects came to light--bits of amphora, roof-tile, terracotta revetments--they were placed in shallow yard-square wooden boxes called _barrelle_, equipped fore and aft with carrying shafts, and labelled accurately with the precise designation of the area from which the finds came: Capitolium Exterior South, Level I; Arx North Slope, Surface, and the like. Small objects--bone _styli_, small sherds, loomweights (pierced terracotta parallelepipeds, whose weight held the threads hanging straight down on an ancient vertical loom), lamps, fragments of inscriptions--went into separate marked cloth bags. Thus the horizontal and vertical findspot of each object was precisely known, so that when a dated or datable object was found in a level, the whole level could be automatically dated, and so the whole mosaic painstakingly put together and the history of the site analyzed, or, as the archaeologist says, “read.” The meanest potsherd, accurately defining a context, thus becomes more valuable historically than a whole museum shelf full of gold jewelry from an unstratified dig. When a _barrella_ and a set of cardboard boxes had been filled, they were carried to the excavation shack and sorted. Objects that could not be “read”--shapeless bits of rubble, parts of coarse pots without profile of base or rim--were discarded, the rest sent to be washed. After washing and drying, cataloguing began. Every object was painted with a small square of shellac, on which its catalogue number was written in India ink and then shellacked over to preserve it. A letter indicated the dig, another the season, a number showed the place of the object in the chronological sequence of finds. A typical entry might read like the card, p. 101. Leica or plate photographs were taken of all important finds and separately indexed for ready reference in the final publication. CC 1487 Capitolium Exterior South Level I Moulded terra-cotta revetment Width 0.17 (centimeters) Height 0.14 Thickness 0.03 Pale pink terra-cotta, much pozzolana. All edges preserved, slight crack lower right corner. Nail-holes each corner. Strigillated cornice moulding above, finishing in a half-round moulding, enriched thunderbolt pattern in field. Thunderbolt runs from upper left to lower right, tapering to points at ends, hand grip in center; enriched on either side of hand grip with seven-point sword-and-sickle palmettes. Photograph.