Archaeologists tend to classify or type artifacts and features. This is done by looking at attributes.
Look at the following artifacts. How would you group them? You would look at length, width, perhaps material (as seen from color differences.)...
What you are doing as you look at these and try to group them is look at attributes.
ATTRIBUTES are the smallest unit of analysis. An attribute is a characteristic such as color or a measurement of length or width.
cThe task of sorting through artifacts and making some sense of what fragments may mean is a time consuming effort. Yet it often has rewards. The following video shows you how you can take and sort through a vast amount of material and begin to learn from it. This is the story of glass recovered from a sunken ship from the Mediterranean off the coast of Turkey. It was a ship carrying both raw glass and discarded glass. The latter is simply trash for someone but it may open doors to enlighten us about the past. 
