Hello my name is Michael Lavin,
Senior Conservator for the Jamestown Rediscovery project
and we're here at the DeWitt Wallace collections and conservation building
at Colonial Williamsburg
to get the wood ID'd from the pistol.
My name is Chris Swann.
I'm Furniture Conservator at Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
and today we're going to be looking at some wood identification
to aid in trying to better understand the woods that are found at Jamestown
in particular the pistol that was found.
And I have a sample or two of the wood with me
and what we're gonna do is do a little bit of wood identification
by taking some thin sections from the samples
and trying to identify the microscopic characteristics
to draw some conclusions about the type of wood that that pistol is made of.
I need a thin thin section.
So the next cut will be...
with any luck that little bit is a thin section.
With archaeological wood it's so soft and so friable
you can't really slice as thinly as you'd like to with a hard wood that's intact
so you have to kind of—in order not to just crush it all together
you have to kind of gauge for something that's a little thicker than you'd like.
And I'm going to wash it off onto my slide here.
And then I can just—I can check that in Close-ups Go before I go over to analytical scope.
See if I have something.
This is actually an infrared microscope, fourier-transform infrared, FTIR,
short, short for fourier-transform infrared,
and it has both infrared objectives and the optical objectives both
so I'm just using it with the light transmitted light in the optical objectives
for this particular wood identification.
So I've got a 10x objective here
and I'm just going to see if I can zero in on this a little bit.
Wow, this is a great section.
It took this one.
Check it out.
- Oh wow, it's very clear.
- It's pretty thick but with enough light you can get some of the features coming through.
So you see the rays coming at you.
So now we can count how many cells high those rays are,
how many wide if any at all.
We can clearly identify in this case
the structure of these intravessel pits as being alternate
so that's another feature that we can add,
alternate intravessel pitting,
simple perforation plates raised one to three seriate, six to eight cells high,
and the rays are heterogenous.
- What does this microscopic points tell you to different wood types?
What does it include and exclude?
I have to go back to the books at this point
and sort of go through some of those choices.
I don't remember all of them.
But it would certainly exclude all of the ring porous woods for example
in a very gross kind of way.
- What are some examples of ring porous?
- Like oak and ash, hickory, chestnut, all of those kind of woods, completely out.
And you can tell by looking at the wood even by high I think in that case
but this confirms this is a diffuse porous wood
so that means a very dense, closely-grown cellular structure, very solid.
The other woods that are similar I think we can rule out
by any number of features that we're not seeing
so for example the holly, the ilex, has opposite intravessel pitting.
We can rule that out.
The maple has a homogeneous cell structure.
We can rule that out.
The cherry has all the features that we've seen,
and based on the other similar woods that are fairly common,
I would conclude that it's one of the cherries or one of the prunus groups.