Hole-in-Cap Versus Sanitary: The Seam Tells You When
A hole-in-cap tin can in a Nevada mining camp deposit brackets your deposit before 1905. A sanitary-seam can brackets it after approximately 1904 and confirms mechanized production. If your feature scatter contains both types in a single locus with no evidence of bioturbation, you either have a long-occupation deposit, intrusive material from a later use episode, or you miscorrelated the strat. That determination starts at the Type field.
The Type vocabulary in this template covers sixteen categories: Hole-in-Cap, Hole-in-Top, Sanitary, UPTT, Flat Top Beverage, Cone Top, and so on through Fuel, Oil, Coffee, Spice, and Fragments. These are not loose descriptors. They map to published typologies and carry temporal and functional implications that raw description in a field notebook cannot replicate efficiently across a multi-hundred-can assemblage.
Side Seam, Solder, and the Three Questions That Date a Dump
The three manufacturing attributes—Side Seam, Solder, and Opening Method—work as a composite dating signature. Lap seam with hand solder places you in pre-1900 industrial output. Internally rolled seam with machine solder is post-1904 mechanization. Drawn seam indicates a later welded or seamless process. None of these attributes is definitive alone. Together, they create a manufacturing profile that cross-references against your Type selection to either confirm or flag a record that needs another look.
Opening Method is where this template shows its field origin. Twenty distinct options—Knife, X-Cut, Rotary, P-38, Center-Punch Rotary, Church Key, Pull Tab, Key-Wind Side Strip, and more—cover the full range of consumer and military opening technologies from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. A P-38 church key in an otherwise pre-WWI deposit context is a flag. A pull-tab can at a Civil War site is an intrusion. These are the calls you make in the field, and you can only make them if the field has the vocabulary.
What the Density Number Connects To
Count and Density/m² appear together here for the same reason they appear in any serious archaeological artifact database: raw count without unit area produces incomparable data across contexts. A locus with eleven cans in a 2×2 unit is a density of 2.75/m². A concentration with the same eleven cans in a 1×1 scrape is 11/m². The interpretation of whether you have a dump episode, a scatter, or a usage area depends on that number, not on the count alone.
The spatial hierarchy—Inventory Type (Site, Feature, Locus, Concentration), F/L/C Number, Artifact Number—ties each record to a recoverable field context. UTM coordinates at the end of each record enable GIS point plotting when the project requires density maps or spatial analysis across a large site.
The Modified field is one worth pausing on. A tin can that has been cut down, pierced, bent, or otherwise altered after its original use is evidence of secondary use. Mining camp artifact assemblages routinely include cans modified into cups, crucibles, candle holders, and lamp bases. That single Yes/No field flags the artifact for detailed description in the Additional Description / Comments field, and it keeps modified artifacts from inflating the functional type counts.
The Label/Mark field is the temporal goldmine that most field forms collapse into "other notes." Partial lithographed labels, embossed manufacturer marks, and impressed lot codes can be matched against corporate and production databases to narrow date ranges to within a few years. A partially legible salmon label with a Pacific Northwest fishery mark and a sanitary seam tightens the TPQ considerably more than seam type alone. That field is worth the extra thirty seconds.