5.6.3. Proveniencing for database management and quantitative analysis

During quantitative analysis, individual artifacts needed integer unique ID numbers that followed through the entire analysis process and could be tracked back to the original artifact. The solution was to concatenate the two series for each artifact by moving the decimal point three units to the right and converted it into a long integer string. For example, for surface materials from ArchID# 1050 the tenth artifact collected would be coded as A03-1050.10. This provenience then became 1050000+10 and therefore 1050010 (a preceding zero was added to Rotulo ID number because in a few cases more than 99 artifacts came from one provenience). The unique artifact ID# solution was applied to excavated LotID.RotuloID numbers, such that Lot# 215 and artifact #15 would be coded as L03-215.15, and this became 215015. In order to avoid confusion between numbering for ArchID# (surface materials) and LotID# (excavated materials), 2,000,000 was added to the Lot numbers. The highest ArchID# recorded in 2003 was 1120 and therefore these coded to unique artifact ID#s as 1,120,000. Thus, in order to not overlap at all with the surface materials in the database system, the LotID# began at 2,000,000. Therefore in the previous LotID# example, the L03-215.15artifact would be coded as 215015 + 2,000,000 and therefore 2,215,015 which falls in a range that has no risk of overlapping with the ArchID# artifact example that is 1,050,010. While these numbers are cumbersome to type, they are managed easily in a database.