I came across these gorgeous archaeological notebooks on Pinterest, and traced them back to a website about the archaeological excavations of the Athenian Agora being carried out by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. I’m always fascinated by field notebooks and scientific notebooks like this!

Archaeological excavation in the Athenian Agora is recorded in a series of three separate notebooks: the field notebooks, the pottery notebooks, and the find notebooks.

A field notebook contains a daily diary that records the results of excavation. This notebook contains a textual description of the excavation process, dividing an area into Contexts (independent archaeological contexts such as layers, walls, rooms, etc.). This notebook also contains Photographs, Plans and Drawings, and references to Objects found during excavation.

A pottery notebook contains a list of the material contents from each archaeological context. This notebook organizes the archaeological contexts into chronological and hierarchical structures. It records the pottery and other non-inventoried objects, using these objects to determine a date for each context.

A find notebook contains a catalog of objects found during excavation. This notebook records more detailed information on each inventoried object (such as title, description, date, dimensions, etc.). A catalog card is created for each object based on these initial descriptions.

The images from their card catalog are also pretty cool! The website also notes that “handheld computers” (which based on the screenshot look like really ancient Palm Pilots) are being used to track and catalog the finds at this excavation. I hope they continue to use paper notebooks too, as the handwritten records are so much more interesting to look at!

You can see more of these archaeological notebooks at Agathe.gr. There are also some additional notebook images in the sections of the website titled “The Notebooks” and “Photography.”