Not every catalog record is a single object. When you bag a group of like items together — say a lot of debitage flakes or a cluster of shell fragments — you record them as one Artifact with a count greater than one rather than entering each piece separately. The default count is 1 for an individual object. This keeps the catalog manageable for bulk material while still letting reports and exports total the actual number of objects recovered across a project.
Technical section
Data model, API, and internals — visible to developers.