ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Post excavation

Imagine playing in a big sandbox and finding something exciting like a toy. After you find the toy, you might want to show it to your friends, but you also need to take care of it. That's what archaeologists do with the things they find when they dig in the ground, which is called excavation. They use all kinds of tools to carefully scoop, brush, and dig around things they find, like pots, bones, and stones.

Once the archaeologists have taken all the things out of the ground, they need to take care of them. They do this by cleaning, sorting, and labeling every item. It's like putting your toys away in your toy chest so you don't lose them. They also make drawings and take photographs of everything they find so they can remember exactly what they discovered, like taking pictures of you with your toy so you can remember playing with it.

After that, they take everything to a place called a laboratory where they can look at everything more closely. This is called post-excavation, which means after finding all the things that were buried. The archaeologists use special equipment like microscopes to study the objects and find out more about what they are used for, how old they are, and what they can tell us about the people who used to live there.

Overall, post-excavation is like taking care of all the things you find in the sandbox, making sure you remember where you found them so you can tell your friends all about them later.