After her first day volunteering as an archaeological technician at The President’s House in Philadelphia, author Elizabeth Mosier ended up spending seven years exploring meaning behind the artifacts she found and cared for. Her memoir, Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home is about how that training prepared her to piece together her own family’s history while she cleaned our her childhood home after her mom died.

“What is important is the information, not the thing,” she says. So if you’re intimidated by the emotion associated with sorting your parents’ stuff, try a more archaeological approach (whip and fedora optional) to determine what it all meant and where it should end up. And then use your experience to sort your own artifacts and make the job easier for your own kids.

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We also talk about how the most important artifacts of our lives are dog-eared and chipped and smeared with grease and end up in the privy pit. And there’s always a way to remember a loved one through their belongings, without filling your apartment with airline seats.

Other links:

* Follow Elizabeth on Instagram

* RIP Louise Glück

* Archaeology Today, from Monty Python’s Flying Circus

* Ron Popeil, who gave us the Pocket Fisherman (but did not, as we learned, create the Hot Dogger)

* What is double-O flour?

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