“What do I do with all these shells?” Basic guidance for the recovery, processing and retention of archaeological marine shells

Marine shells can be common on archaeological sites (even forming sites), and provide large amounts of information about the human past if recovered appropriately. However, guidance for appropriate recovery remains unformulated or not explicitly formulated, leading to too many, too few, and too biased assemblages being excavated, extracted, processed and archived. Guidance is derived for minimum and maximum sample sizes, field sampling methods and deposit priorities, extracting shells from the matrix, and accepting and retaining shells in archive.