PhD Candidate, University of California Berkeley
Heather Law Pezzarossi

Heather is a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology department at UC Berkeley. She received her MA in Historical Archaeology from UMass, Boston in 2008. She is writing her dissertation on the Sarah Boston Farmstead Site, an 18th and 19th century Nipmuc Farmstead in Grafton, Massachusetts. She has worked on this project in collaboration with the Nipmuc Nation and the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at UMass Boston for eight years.
WATCH
Students suit up in goggles and gloves when PhD candidate Heather Law Pezzarossi brings them rusty old nails to practice conserving. These artifacts are from a real archaeological site, giving the students a rare and exciting opportunity to practice iron conservation. They snip, clip, and brush away chunks of rust, and then use tannic acid to preserve the metal.