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Utilizing Older Collections - Episode 32
143 Plays7 years ago
The Women of Archaeology are all professional archaeologists giving their opinions and insights into issues that affect not only women but most professionals in professional archaeology. On today's episode, the hosts will discuss the value of using older collections. Topics include some of the unique challenges posed when working with older collections, the importance of reanalyzing collections, the ethical issues of having collections that aren't used, and our personal stories to laugh at and learn from.
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Transcript
Introduction to Archaeology Podcast Network
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Working with older collections in archaeology. Whether it's a baggie of flakes to, you know, a warehouse full of manos and metates that are stacked on top of each other. That all can consist of a collection. I've noticed the students really connect so much more with the material that we've been learning about if they can actually then handle the material.
Defining and Discussing Older Collections
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to the Women in Archaeology podcast. My name is Chelsea Slotten, and tonight I'm joined by Emily Long, Seidra Black, and Cheryl Fogel Hatch. Good evening, ladies. Thank you so much for being here tonight.
00:00:43
Speaker
So on tonight's episode, we are going to be discussing working with older collections in archaeology. What are older collections? Where are they housed? What are some of the issues surrounding working with them? Why is it important to work with older collections? All of those sorts of questions. And one of the things that
00:01:07
Speaker
inspired this particular episode was at the the SAAs recently. There was a conversation that went on on Twitter that was begun by John Lowe. And then, and you'll have to excuse me, as a Twitter conversation, I have people's Twitter handles, not their real names, but Gingery Gamer, and Archeo Anna, and Penukish, and you know, a whole bunch of people got involved.
00:01:37
Speaker
in this conversation around the question, what responsibility do advisors and collections managers and curators have to encourage their students and researchers to work with existing collections rather than going out and digging?
Challenges in Curation and Preservation
00:01:55
Speaker
And that particular conversation had
00:01:58
Speaker
thousands of replies. And it's absolutely fascinating. And it's not surprising. I think everybody definitely has experience of seeing moldering collections and just going, oh, God, what are we going to do with that? Yeah. And I mean, some of the conversations really varied or some of the comments varied quite
00:02:19
Speaker
strongly depending on what geographical area people were in, from North America to Europe being the two most well-represented areas that participated in this conversation. But it was really fascinating. So I think before we go any further, it's probably a good idea to
00:02:40
Speaker
define what it is we mean when we're talking about older collections. Essentially, collections are anything housed in a museum, forest service, park service, BLM office. Anything that requires curation can be then considered part of a collection, whether it's a baggie of flakes to a warehouse full of manos and metates that are stacked on top of each other. That all can consist of a collection, even
00:03:10
Speaker
the journals and the paperwork, that's all part of an excavation. It all kind of follows into
00:03:17
Speaker
one massive collection that's being housed at different locations. And the quality of the curation can be different all over the place from fantastic, temperature-controlled, beautiful museum-quality warehouse-style areas to house different kinds of collections, all the way to a wooden shed that's full of mice and spider webs.
00:03:45
Speaker
There's a broad range of where collections are being housed and how they're being housed. But essentially a collection can be prehistoric, historic. It can have 10 cans, it can have pieces of Mayan gold and whatnot. It can, a wide range of things and how those things are stored can really depend on the objects themselves. Pottery can be a lot harder to store in terms of their fragility. To Matade, you can
00:04:14
Speaker
essentially put that thing anywhere it is practically indestructible. So essentially collection, just about anything that has to do with people can be part of a collection from an excavation or a survey, all the above. And I know a lot of times when people think collections, they think
00:04:34
Speaker
one of objects and not necessarily the paperwork that's associated with them, although the paperwork is super, super important. And I'm going to come back to that several times, probably over the course of this episode. And we all should nail that home too. The paperwork is crucial. Yes. And someone in the future is going to see your paperwork. I know what you drew on it. And it's so important for figuring out the context of what it is you're looking at and being able to
00:05:04
Speaker
reanalyze and reevaluate in a meaningful way. But the other thing about collections that a lot of people, I think, potentially mistake is kind of where they can be found. And you mentioned museums earlier and shacks, but
00:05:24
Speaker
You have collections in museums, you have collections in archives, you have collections at universities, you have collections in people's attics sometimes. And coffee cans. Shouldn't be there. Park works. Right. But you do also have, and I think a lot of people forget this, the National Park Service has
00:05:53
Speaker
huge collections. They actually have more curatorial and collections positions than the Smithsonian and MoMA and several other large museums combined. So those are also places that you can look for collections that need to be investigated. And if you're imagining at all that scene in Indiana Jones where that giant warehouse of stuff
00:06:18
Speaker
That's not too far from the truth when it comes to collections. There can be these massive storage facilities with so many things. When you go to the Smithsonian museums, you're not even seeing a fraction of what is available to be seen. There are warehouses of stuff, so there's a lot of stuff. It all comes back to our main point on why should we use these older collections as opposed to adding to them.
00:06:44
Speaker
So I believe everyone on this episode has some experience working with some older collections.
Ethical and Cultural Considerations
00:06:52
Speaker
So as much as we love them and as useful as we all find them and as important as we think they are, there are some unique issues that surround using older collections from, as I was saying, there are obviously good reasons for working with older collections.
00:07:11
Speaker
but there are also some unique challenges to working with older collections. So I don't know if people want to touch on some of their own experiences with some of the older collections that they have had the pleasure and or frustration of working with. Let's see, non-standard measurements.
00:07:31
Speaker
1940s to 60s era when they're using English measurements and not metric. Artifacts with a marker on them. Numbers that bear no relation to the numbers in the published reports. Where we had to compare pictures from the report to pictures and then the artifacts themselves. I've gotten to do that before. I think somewhere from like 70 to 40 years ago, I guess, there seems to have been this
00:07:58
Speaker
trend in recording artifacts in the field of put item on page, outline item.
00:08:09
Speaker
number on outline, put all items in same bag. I've gotten that on collections less than 10 years old. So they're still doing that. Wow. Most, most of the collections that I've worked with have either been from an older time period or from a time period, or there's been an older archaeologist involved with the excavation. And you'll have like his set of notes. And
00:08:33
Speaker
you know, someone younger on the scene who, after the fact, went through and redid everything. Yes. And when you have the original notes and all of the artifacts, preservation issues aside with having a whole bunch of artifacts banging around in the same bag, you can usually figure out a pretty good idea of what, you know, the 50 nails that look exactly the same are just going to be the 50 nails that look exactly the same. But I've also seen sometimes where the, in an attempt to preserve
00:09:03
Speaker
these these scans and things they have for these these drawings, they've scanned them into a computer and they don't have any sort of scale on them. And oftentimes they're not scanned at, you know, one to one ratio. And then you're also trying to figure out how much larger or smaller these have been made and what artifacts they might fit with.
00:09:29
Speaker
Great. Yeah, it's frustrating. It's a giant puzzle. I've dealt a lot with mice and rats having eaten the context data from the bag. Ooh. That's problematic. I mean, not only do you get Hantavirus, then you don't get the notes to know what everything is, too. It's double whammy. One of the collections I was originally supposed to work with on my thesis had a lot of that problem. Fortunately, I was able to work with a different collection.
00:09:58
Speaker
but the original one it was paper bags that have been sitting in a metal out building for over 20 years at that point next to some springs. It was rough. Someone did eventually get to it and had to like piece together the parts of the bag that were left with some tweezers to try and get the context.
00:10:24
Speaker
I've heard nightmare stories, something along those lines, but also where things are held in multiple sheds and then one of the sheds burns down. And so maybe you had the paper separate from the artifacts or the artifacts that their stones survived, but then you don't have the paperwork or things just generally being separated from where they're from. You get those super early, you know, and I'm excavation in quotes, you know,
00:10:50
Speaker
excavation with a wink early on, types where they were digging out Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon and they're essentially just hauling all this stuff back to the Smithsonian and to New York and just like truckloads of stuff. And so everything's been separated then across, you know, to different universities, different agencies. And so who knows
00:11:14
Speaker
what collection goes with what in that so many of the pieces have been separated. Then something from just one room, all the objects are spread across the United States. And that in itself is a nightmare trying to piece back together like, all right, this one thing should technically be here, but it could be at this one university in a different state because this one guy gave it to another guy back in 1930. Yes, we're having a couple of those issues here in the state I'm working in.
00:11:44
Speaker
someone like found the old, uh, uh, bio arts closet and there was like random human remains in there. Someone has gotten a grant and is trying to get more money to do it. Like, where is this from? Where's that from? We have maybe this article from the twenties that he excavated this rock shelter. This, where are these things coming from? Why are some of these have holes in them? Are those,
00:12:12
Speaker
his teaching models, where did they go from? And then we also, not that long, well, this has been almost 20 years now, this main state facility the roof caved in. Oh, no. And that's a serious problem. There was a discussion. There was there was actually not
00:12:32
Speaker
specifically geared towards the need for work with existing collections, but on a collection in Belize that was really well taken care of for about 40 years and maybe a decade ago, the individual who was curating this collection unfortunately passed away. He was an older gentleman and
00:12:57
Speaker
you know, Belize is hot and humid and the shelves were wooden and he had shelves full of remains that, you know, there are pictures of, of nicely stacked and organized. And unfortunately they weren't, you know, in boxes or containers or bags or anything of any sort. They were just kind of sitting in, here's a pile of like one thing, here's a pile of another thing, but very carefully labeled. And because no one went into this, um,
00:13:26
Speaker
office lab space for a decade, when they finally did open the door, all of the shelves had brought it and everything. And so it's just one big mess. Right. And even though you do have some of the all right. You know, I've got labels for some things short of DNA testing, trying to put people back together. Yeah, we even have that problem with older famous collections like the Tuck collection.
00:13:57
Speaker
The two mummified fetuses were like delicate and perfectly preserved when first excavated and someone tried to go back and look at them a few years ago and they're just, one of them is dust, and the other one
00:14:11
Speaker
not in great shape. And that just brings up an interesting point too with human remains. At least in the United States, just for the sake of our listeners, there's been a massive push since the creation establishment of NAGPRA, the Native American Graves
00:14:32
Speaker
Native American Green Protection Repatriation Act and that there are still collections that are so churned up or things get mixed together that even though there has been a push to repatriate a lot of these remains and objects that
00:14:47
Speaker
There are still things being found and technically by now most things should be repatriated, but there are things still in boxes, whether burial objects or even human remains, a random femur, a random mandible will be found in a different collection. And that poses a lot of issues too, not only just with the conservation, but a lot of ethical issues. I'm like, well, where has this been? Why hasn't it been repatriated yet, et cetera. And a lot of the records from those early
00:15:17
Speaker
collections unfortunately provenance is sometimes not there sometimes the paperwork just doesn't exist and sometimes you look at it and what's written down is a thousand percent wrong and it becomes very clear very quickly that this human remains are oftentimes this will happen with grave goods that you know are sometimes easier to identify with a particular cultural group
00:15:46
Speaker
based on their stylistic variations or the method that was used to create them. Like pottery types, stone tools, things that are really good clear indicators of a specific culture. Right, and it'll let list culture A and when you look at it, it's clearly from culture C and then you start to get into questions of
00:16:08
Speaker
the likelihood of this being grave robbery, which oftentimes unfortunately is fairly high, but then who are we repatriating it to? Do we go with the records? Do we go with how we would classify it today? Is there a modern group that's claiming it? And trying to figure out all of these pieces can be very complex and there's no one size fits all solution. So you kind of have to
00:16:38
Speaker
to do it again every time. And it makes the process time consuming.
00:16:43
Speaker
Keeping that in mind, I will say there are some beautiful, glorious, fulfilling theses and dissertations of figuring that out. I got to watch one and it was really, really interesting to watch. One of my classmates, the university had been given a NAGPRA collection from one of those, you know, small desert mom and pop little museums. And the remains had been excavated in the early 20th century by the local, what was it?
00:17:13
Speaker
football coach and the team from the high school. And they had, you know, been at this little museum and then they they were like, Oh, nag press. So they somehow got to the university I was going to. And she was able this was her entire
00:17:30
Speaker
her entire thesis. She figured out who these people were, where they came from, their MNI's. She got them in context and they were delivered to her, you guys. And so all the long bones were in cans. There was a bad bag of like teeth and pieces. There's some other questionable collection management practices that don't need to be public, but
Research and Funding Challenges
00:17:58
Speaker
But she was able to sit there in the ballroom because we had like a little area for like human remains that was, you know, often different from all of us rock lickers that were outside the ballroom. And I thought it was really, it gave them their respect back, you know, as human remains. Wow. I didn't mean to imply that it was like
00:18:20
Speaker
impossible and it's super important. It just is really hard and it's really time consuming. And it needs to be done. Right. So I'm just saying, think about that. You don't have to go get your remains. You don't have to go do this or that. These things are there and they need you. And unfortunately, I have time for conditions in which stuff is stored. I'm the greatest. So I think that that's a really great point to kind of end on for our first 20 minutes is
00:18:50
Speaker
These collections are there and they need someone to work with them and give them a chance. So we'll be back shortly. This network is supported by our listeners. You can become a supporting member by going to arcpodnet.com slash members and signing up. As a supporting member, you have access to high quality downloads of each show and a discount at our future online store.
00:19:15
Speaker
and access to show hosts on a members only Slack team. For professional members, we'll have training shows and other special content offered throughout the year. Once again, go to arkpodnet.com slash members to support the network and get some great extras and swag in the process. That's arkpodnet.com slash members. Hi, and welcome back to the Women in Archaeology podcast. So far on tonight's episode, we have been discussing the
00:19:43
Speaker
some of the challenges that exist when you are working with older collections and defining what exactly it is we mean by older archaeological collections and where you can find them. In the next 20 minutes, we're going to talk a bit more about why it's really important that we, you know,
00:20:05
Speaker
work through some of the difficulties to utilize these collections and really have them contribute to the archaeological record. And I believe, Cheryl, you had some thoughts on that. I do. My PhD dissertation research was on stone projectile points from the paleoindian period. So that's big spear tips from roughly 9,000 years ago. And I was interested in
00:20:33
Speaker
what facts in manufacture made some of these similar between different modern states now. So New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, basically. And I looked at projectile points from 13 different sites and they were in four different museums with a couple of sites split between museums. And the collection probably the earliest was in the early 40s.
00:20:59
Speaker
And then the latest was into the late 90s, early 2000s, give or take. And you couldn't answer that systematic question about how artifacts look in a region by excavating one site. So the only data points of use would have been different sites. And so it made sense for the museums that held the collections to be the places where I collected my data.
00:21:29
Speaker
a week at the Smithsonian, which is really cool because you talk about the behind the scenes work and you're walking down the office halls with the different curators and they have glass cases and stuff that they're researching that's not on display. And that was like a kid in a candy store. So that was one thing. And then University of Colorado and University of Wyoming, you know, university settings, but you know, these were collections that were normally open to the public. And then I was able to
00:21:56
Speaker
through contacts get a hold of a private collector for some things in the that were excavated in the 40s and 50s and you know sold through a couple collectors
00:22:09
Speaker
open to having them studied and so one day yeah one day you know it's we're sitting he had a big long wooden table and he brought out the projectile points and I was able to cross reference some of it because I'd already handled some casts in university collection and so there was a there was
00:22:29
Speaker
differences just because the casts weren't that accurate. But it was interesting to just sort of informally note the differences, but I could not have done that as field excavation.
00:22:43
Speaker
Now the problem is I had to deal with everybody else's recording methods and I had to be very familiar with the excavation reports and who was doing what and what these units meant and who thought that that was right and who thought that it was wrong and I had to really go into the history of archaeological theory and explain hey this stuff was collected in the 40s and the standards were different and the interpretation was different and it
00:23:09
Speaker
force the research to be much more in context for archaeological theory and archaeological history, as well as answering the question that I had. But on the flip side of it, I was researching stone tools. They preserve well. The projectile points are pretty. They're kept.
00:23:31
Speaker
you know, in the 40s, some of the flakes might have been thrown away, but the projectile points were kept. So I was definitely dealing with preservation bias, but that was okay because the question I had was about manufacturers of projectile points.
00:23:46
Speaker
So that's pretty much my comments there. That's awesome. It sounds like it was a really worthwhile study that not only did you work with a unique collection, but got to learn a lot about them too. The logistics were a little crazy, you know, trying to get four different research trips done and I ended up funding it on several small grants. And so I did it over, you know, a couple of years rather than, you know, if I'd done that one summer's worth of field work or two summers worth of field work.
00:24:16
Speaker
It all works out in the wash. That brings up an interesting point just with the funding to think sometimes it's cheaper to do maybe a survey or a small excavation as opposed to doing a study of older collections. And I wonder if that's true across the board, if it's sometimes harder and more expensive to work with an older collection than just doing your own test excavation somewhere else. I don't know about harder or more expensive.
00:24:44
Speaker
I do know several years ago, probably more than a decade, potentially even two, Joan Giro wrote a really fascinating piece that I believe was called the woman at home ideology. And one of the things that she looked at in that was the funding realities for
00:25:10
Speaker
both men versus women, but also for collections based work. And she was particularly looking at information from the NSF. I think in part because all of the information from the NSF on who they're given, they have given grants to is publicly available. But she was looking at the percentage of dissertations, dissertation studies that were funded.
00:25:38
Speaker
by the NSF. And grant proposals that included some element of fieldwork were funded at a much higher rate than solely collection-based fieldwork. And that's not to say that some of these proposals didn't have collection-based components to them, you know, where they were going to spend five months excavating in the summer, but the site that they were going to be excavating at
00:26:03
Speaker
had been excavated for three years prior and they wanted to get the funding to also look at the artifacts that were in the collection from the three previous years and spend time in the lab. So they weren't necessarily 100% excavation reports, but this kind of idea of macho he-man out in the fields finding, you know,
00:26:29
Speaker
whatever Atlantis or whatever it is we're, you know, discovering something seems much sexier than being like, I'm going to work in Egypt or finding a temple in Greece or Turkey or finding a quote unquote, lost, you know, Mayan city or whatever it is that we're
00:26:53
Speaker
But I was able to find a change in technology that statistically significantly correlated to climate change in prehistory. Which is so important! So important! And that's way sexier than a step.
00:27:09
Speaker
Yes.
Technological and Cultural Perspectives
00:27:10
Speaker
But the step I found was cool. Part of how this is valued, you know, not only in like an American or Western culture in general, but still what we're sort of fighting against in the culture of archaeology in the West. Oh, definitely. You can get the money for this, you can get the money for that. But what about?
00:27:28
Speaker
all these other things and we have seen you know since oh the 70s or 80s in paleontology people realizing the value of the collections and you know you'll see people talking like oh i went through this whole hundred year thing and i found this hen i found this and this completely changed what we thought about this species in this time period and i mean people are gonna realize existed
00:27:53
Speaker
We realized this wasn't the head for that one. Okay. We re-digged this nest and found out these things or different species are actually the juveniles of this one and the hatchlings of that one.
00:28:04
Speaker
I'm sure the same thing's been happening a bunch with archaeological collections. I mean, people are constantly finding out new things. I mean, just look at, let's see the Ice Man. Nothing has been new, like new and from where he was found. There has been no excavations, whatever. And there has been, what, 20 some years of research just on this one individual. I mean, granted, he's a treasure trove of information. But if you think about it, I mean, it's just,
00:28:31
Speaker
It just keeps me more and more. And the animation just to see him. And so it's just like, think of all the things that could be found in other collections as technology is always improving. They're finding out more stuff about, let's see, the Ice Man. Well, that can be true for all kinds of collections. Like if you have an old soil sample or wooden beam or, I don't know, charcoal, that random charcoal sample from a site that nothing's been done with and new technology comes out or better AMS.
00:29:00
Speaker
You can test it and then new things are found out. But I don't think people always remember that. Like you're saying about the dinosaur bones, the same thing can be said. It's like, you never know what you'll find or with new technology and as data databases are improving, we can learn more things. Or even just with new eyes. I mean, you'll, you'll go through a collection that was curated by a bunch of dudes and you put it all in all women.
00:29:28
Speaker
crew on looking at them with new eyes and you'll get some fascinating new interpretations. Oh yeah. Or you'll take something from the southwest that was interpreted by white people and put indigenous archaeologists on it and they go oh no that's not what that is.
00:29:49
Speaker
Exactly. And so, I mean, if people are going to get paleontology and archaeology confused all the time. Anyway, might as well glom onto that excitement for the collections and say, look, friend our lab work.
00:30:04
Speaker
I always get frustrated in some of my work at CRM because I actually took the CRM specialized classes in grad school and they're like, oh, you know, for curation, you have to put this huge chunk. If you're going to do it right, I'm like, yeah, we're going to do it right. And then I would try and put these budgets together. And some of my supervisors were like, no, no, it does that much for curation. I'm like, that's why your data suck.
00:30:30
Speaker
Your data are now useless. You left your artifacts in the car part of the house you sold. I thought in the CRM world generally if they paid curation it was like just to get it to the museum and then the museum stuck with the ongoing costs and you know federal agencies are supposed to pay the ongoing costs and I had a couple years worth of work as a
00:30:57
Speaker
student intern for a federal agency and I was dealing with some of the proposals and the scopes of work and just, you know, dotting the I's and crossing the T's and making sure all the numbers added up and inevitably someone from operations would come into the office of the archaeologist and the biologist and say, why are we paying for this? And you'd have to explain.
00:31:17
Speaker
It's an ongoing cost. We're responsible for it once it comes out of the ground. I was going to say, on that note, I think there are instances where people don't realize that it's an ongoing cost or when they're excavating, they don't necessarily factor in the ongoing cost to the cost of excavation. And it's interesting and fascinating to learn new things about the past cultures. I think we would all agree with that. We're all archaeologists for a reason.
00:31:47
Speaker
But there are so many issues with funds not being available and collections rotting away or like bits of Pompeii are falling down because they don't have the money to fix and support all of these houses that survived in ancient times because people were living them and doing kind of the day-to-day maintenance to keep the building standing and then Vesuvius
00:32:16
Speaker
In case in a volcano, ash, cold lava and everything is pretty good preservation technique a lot of times. Depending on what it is you're talking about, what are like the ethical responsibilities
00:32:34
Speaker
of archaeologists for taking this information out of the ground, doing some sort of interpretation with it, but then allowing the wealth of knowledge that's in those objects and those artifacts to degrade and disappear. It doesn't seem fair to modern people for all the information that we're losing. It is certainly not fair to people in the past who
00:33:01
Speaker
Um, you know, especially again, if you're talking human remains, like, but we're, we're disrupting them and their, their lives and, you know, the evidence of their life. And I think that there is also an ethical concern there.
00:33:15
Speaker
And that's a concern I don't think a lot of people take into account because the fun part is the digging. Who does it love excavating? I mean, I love collections. I think collections are fun, but... And I do too. It's just like when you're in the dirt, like I mean, for...
00:33:32
Speaker
From my personal experience, I mean, when I'm excavating a slab-lined roasting pit, I'm not thinking about what are going to happen to those slabs once I wrap them in foil and send them off for curation.
00:33:46
Speaker
And it doesn't necessarily occur to me, but it's a really good point because it's like, whoa, what is going to happen to this stuff? It'll get tested clean, but then it's coming in the collections for however long. And I know there's been, like you're saying, ethical debates. Well, some museums are even considering selling collections that they don't consider will have any more value or there isn't the space. Well, then that brings up a major ethical concern of, well, heck, is that even ethical? Should we even do that?
00:34:15
Speaker
What should be done at these collections? Why did I even bag all those pieces anyway? Exactly. I know you're going to put a nice term on it as deaccession, but... Ugh, no. I call it a bad idea. Sure, but some of that is done with the best of intentions of I can't afford to take care of this.
00:34:40
Speaker
if I sell it to someone else with, you know, a legal agreement that they will take care of that. And then all of a sudden I also get this chunk of change that I can use to take care of the collection items that I still do have. And that's our dance, isn't it? I worry about the precedent at charts. I know that several of the collections institutions that I've dealt with, you know,
00:35:07
Speaker
putting stuff up from the field have been raising their prices. And everywhere here from the CRM archaeologists are like, oh, I can't believe they're raising their prices. But they actually need to raise them that much because they have to take care of them because we're concerned forever. And they have to get the fire extinguisher that won't ruin your paperwork or your carbon samples. They have to do all this stuff. Not just any kinds of boxes, but fancy boxes.
00:35:35
Speaker
very fancy box your papers don't decay exact photos and those special see-through papers to put the really old papers in so you can actually look at them
00:35:48
Speaker
stuff like that. And so that's not only value of our culture, you know, trying to get the stuff funded, but also in the people that are being attracted to our field.
Data Accessibility and Institutional Changes
00:35:59
Speaker
It's like I love digging, but I also love digging through a collection and looking for patterns. I was quite fortunate. The funding I was able to get for, for my thesis was I had to get all the old field schools together and all their data and that joy of recording
00:36:19
Speaker
and then also run a field school and smoosh it all together and say, look at this thing I figured out. And without all those old ones, even with some of the recording errors, I would not have gotten my pattern. I would not have had enough data to make it statistically significant. I would have had a lot of really cool rocks and I would have had a great public presentation because my site had a lot of projectile points.
00:36:50
Speaker
But I would have said that there was like, look, there's some gray rocks. What does that mean? I mean, I love my rocks. But I like it more when my rocks are talking to me. And only if I can get the collection and compare it to other collections and learn the language of other rocks. And then we can have a conversation. Yeah, it's about getting the data out because everybody knows archaeologists who do all sorts of fieldwork and then don't write up. And like 50 years later,
00:37:15
Speaker
no one knows the excavation records for a particular site because it's not published. And the same problem I think happens in the museum world. Everybody knows people who excavate and send it off to the museum and nothing's heard of it again. So part of this is when you excavate, please, for the love of whatever it is you believe in, publish not just an article, but publish your data, make it open source, put your spreadsheets out there.
00:37:42
Speaker
don't hide it. But for nothing else, do it for the ego. Like, aha, you got that. But you had to use my data. I will say, I keep going back to my thesis in this episode just because it's very pertinent to this particular discussion, but there's been a lot more theses done at my site, at our locations immediately adjacent to my site, and they all have to cite me.
00:38:12
Speaker
and then research. Google Scholar in your reference. Yeah. Yeah. I can join the other technology bees. It's now black, black, bled, Delvin, and shot. Like I said, it's changed in the value.
00:38:35
Speaker
of people's perceptions of the data and people's perceptions of the work. And that's good for everybody. Yeah, it it really is. So I think that that again is a great place to stop on is that we really need to engage in some like institutional type type change in how we value collections. And when we come back, we'll maybe talk a little bit about
00:39:03
Speaker
ways that we can work on that and some places that have had more success than we maybe have with utilizing the collections that they do have.
00:39:16
Speaker
Interested in archaeology? Want to hear from experts in the field about the latest discoveries and interpretations? Check out The Archaeology Show every other Saturday and let hosts Chris Webster and April Camp Whitaker take you deeper into the story. Check out The Archaeology Show at www.archpodnet.com forward slash archaeology and subscribe, rate, and comment on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, and the Google Music Store. That's www.archpodnet.com forward slash archaeology. Now back to the show.
00:39:45
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Women in Archaeology podcast. So far tonight we've been talking about using older collections in our research, some of the difficulties and some of the rewards of doing that. And moving on in this third section, we are going to start talking about a couple of different things, some ways in which we can try to encourage people to use collections, some other
00:40:15
Speaker
countries that have had some better success rates with getting people to use their collections, how to get access to collections, some potential uses for collections that might not have a provenance but are still useful archaeological tools. And Emily, I believe you had some thoughts on that. So if you want to jump in.
00:40:35
Speaker
Sure. So for my master's thesis project, and it's great because it seems like we all used collections in one way or another, I've worked with a whole bunch of unpervenienced artifacts and so there were just boxes and boxes of things that
00:40:51
Speaker
where people had taken stuff from public lands and then decided to donate it later, but who knows where it came from. If you have 1.2 million acres to choose from, it's hard to pinpoint where to put something. And so for my thesis, I was making a simulated excavation.
Educational Uses of Collections
00:41:10
Speaker
at a large scale and so I was literally just handed boxes of different types of pottery flakes that we have no idea what to do with and we already had type collections for pottery and flakes and whatnot so we didn't need another teaching collection so I was able to create really really unique layers in this big massive scale simulated excavation that school groups would then excavate down so building
00:41:37
Speaker
ground up, which is a lot of fun, but we were able to do something with these collections that otherwise had no purpose. And so they were a great education tool.
00:41:47
Speaker
And before that helped create different teaching collections where this pottery, flakes, tools that we had no idea where it came from, ground stone, all of these things that could then be used for school groups, even really young kids who wouldn't otherwise really be able to handle artifacts. And then we wouldn't have to worry too much if they broke them, if they got scattered or anything of that sort. And so they can be wonderful education tools
00:42:17
Speaker
And kids really get into it when they can actually touch the material. It's not just seeing it through the glass at a museum. They get to handle something. I think the lessons really sink in much deeper.
00:42:31
Speaker
And honestly, I think that's true even at a higher level. Even teaching at the college level, I've noticed, not vast experience, but in my one class that I've been teaching, I've noticed the students really connect so much more with the material that we've been learning about if they can actually then handle the material as opposed to this concept. And it kind of ties everything together nicely. So I feel like Unprevenience Collections have a lot of use
00:42:59
Speaker
They don't need just to sit around and not have any purpose. They can really have a lot of use educationally, from type collections to doing fun things with students to creating a simulated excavation. There's a lot of different things that can be done. The labs that I taught at university in the Audis, we used unpervenience, poorly-pervenienced artifacts of various types for the class. Yeah, so did we. And it's also nice that they weren't
00:43:30
Speaker
part of a really important collection, because at least once a year, something was stolen. Ooh. What are you doing with the flake? Like, why? Being excited that you have it for 10 minutes, shoving it in the back of your drawer, forgetting it's there, and leaving it there, or throwing it on the ground after you've shown your friend. Don't do that. And you certainly brought up a thing, because I was very fortunate growing up that my family and my teachers nurtured.
00:44:00
Speaker
this weird history, archeology, geology thing that I had. I was that annoying kid that their siblings would be in the museum. Okay, we saw it, whatever. I'm like, I have to read every word. And some, some, not a small part of the archeology, not only do I get to tell people stories, but I get to touch the stuff. Right? You know that stuff you saw? I get to touch it.
00:44:27
Speaker
You get to find it. A lot of collections, I get to touch it. Yeah, but then you found it in the collections after nobody else has it. Yes, I found it twice. Yeah. So yeah, go into collections and you get to touch stuff. And not get in trouble. Yes, I'm not getting in trouble. You know how to touch it correctly.
00:44:55
Speaker
I know I've never been so terrified of breaking something than being in a museum collection room of prehistoric ancestral Puebloan pottery.
00:45:05
Speaker
And they were moving the collections and so things were on these like foam pedestals and all the stuff and kind of looking around and they're like here hold this and I'm just like I'm gonna break it and just being utterly terrified I was gonna break this beautiful like intact pot from some site and I was just like oh god
00:45:27
Speaker
I mean, it's a true testament to those museum curators that they didn't break anything. I think it's awesome that they can create these beautiful pedestals and means to protect these artifacts that I know I'm a klutz and should not be trusted around. That's an art in and of itself. Oh, yeah. Every now and then I'd go in the human remains room and I was like, I don't want to breathe.
00:45:56
Speaker
I'm going to breathe somebody in. I don't want to hurt you. Studies done about the non viability of pathogens that exist in skeletons. I'm not saying they're all non viable. Oh, is that the pathogens? It's just I'm breathing in a person. It's just a weird concept.
00:46:19
Speaker
It is a weird concept. And I didn't want to mess up her research. I was like, I want to breathe wrong and then your skull that you just finished putting together is going to fall down. It's going to break. It's going to be all my fault. But this is not to dissuade anybody from going into a collections room.
00:46:38
Speaker
I mean, you learn how to go regularly. Yeah, you learn how to work with it. I don't know that I have these major concerns. Well, you're used to it. I'm used to bumbling around in the great out of doors with a shovel and a screen and I can run into trees and not worry about it. And it's the type of collections that you're dealing with. If it's something you're not used to, excuse me, used to, you know, if you're used to doing documents and you're in a bone room or if you're used to doing ceramics,
00:47:05
Speaker
And now you're in a ceramic gel textile room. If you put me in a ceramics room, I would probably cry. And be like so afraid. You're just sitting there vibrating and wearing the vibrating rake or something. Yeah. So anyway, these collections, how do you even get to touch them? Secret handshake. Right. It can be really tricky. I mean, it kind of depends on what you're you're looking at.
00:47:31
Speaker
Having institutional affiliation certainly makes things easier, whether that you work at a university or you work at another museum or at a national park service. Players contracting to the same. Yeah, exactly. Oftentimes, that means contacting the head of the collection, which usually means some internet research. If you're lucky, if you're not, have fun with your phone book. We're rapidly moving away from those days, but they're not gone yet.
00:48:02
Speaker
But contacting the appropriate person and requesting access, which is less, hey, I want access and more. I'm interested in access. What form do I need to fill out? What type of proposal do you need? You're often going to have to submit a several page proposal, even if you are with an academic institution, which they will review and approve or not approve, depending on what you're looking for. There can be special
00:48:26
Speaker
Considerations, human remains always have special considerations when you're talking about trying to access those items. If you are not affiliated with a particular institution, it's often harder to get access. You have to prove that you have the requisite skills and that you are a trustworthy enough person to allow, you know,
00:48:50
Speaker
into their collection rooms. They're not just going to let anybody in there. You have to get someone to vouch for you. Although sometimes museums provide a tour, but I don't think you're allowed to touch things. Well, I will say in textile research is one area where I've seen people that – it's the area I've seen the most that people who are not associated with a research facility or a university, or maybe not even have the
00:49:15
Speaker
what we might consider credentials, but have been able to prove their research capabilities. And so they basically have had to move up, you know, they go to the local museum, they go, I want to look at your Victorian courses, the stuff that we have more examples of, you're going to be able to get easier access to with less qualifications. And by doing that, just like any other field, right?
00:49:38
Speaker
You can move your way up. I mean, obviously you need a permit to be able to conduct an excavation on public lands. Do you need a permit to be able to look at the collections?
Access and Consultation Protocols
00:49:51
Speaker
Not that I'm aware of. Like if it's at a national park or forest? In the United States, not that I've come across. Okay.
00:50:02
Speaker
I think the general rule of thumb in the U.S. is if you can convince the collection manager that you are a qualified enough individual to access the collection. They act as the gatekeeper. Right, you should be allowed to. Now, some of that does change based on the country that you're in. There are also specific considerations around indigenous objects. So one of the... Always human remains.
00:50:31
Speaker
Right. But not even human remains. I mean, when we talk about NAGPRA, everyone talks about giving things back, not realizing that there are also some tribes who don't want their things back either because that's complicated. Yes, that's very complicated, you know, or who are willing to allow their objects to remain in curation.
00:50:51
Speaker
with a particular collections manager that they know and trust, you know, and it gets into into the reeds very, very quickly. But you can have collections. I was reading a particular piece about a collection in I believe it was New Zealand, where they, you know, the Maori group, I believe it was that this collection was from those individuals were willing to allow
00:51:18
Speaker
the collection to exist, but they wanted some sort of affirmation that the collections manager in charge of this particular part of the collection would always be male because of, you know, cultural constraints around who can access and who can see these and that they wanted
00:51:41
Speaker
to be able to look over any requests to access the collection and that like women couldn't do it. And that if you were talking about like a multidisciplinary and a multi-person team, like you couldn't have women on that team, you know, you could have a bunch of co-authors, but all of them had to be male. And this really difficult position that the museum was put in because there was some concern that they might be opening themselves up to some claims regarding like sexism.
00:52:11
Speaker
Because if we agree to all of this, how do we tell 50% of the population that they just
00:52:19
Speaker
can't access it, and that also influences their hiring in the future. It means they will never be able to hire a woman into this position. That is complicated on many, many levels. Yeah. And these are things you have to research to do your research. And I do think, I mean, that is an issue definitely in collections, or issues of cultural patrimony, what objects are considered sacred, and that's not always a factor in when things are being studied.
00:52:47
Speaker
It's always important with consultation as well for whatever project is being done. Even if you're doing a collections based project, make sure you're consulting with those who need to be consulted. Because these collections are fascinating, amazing, but you want to make sure you're giving them the respect and those that the objects have descendants who care about those objects are consulted.
00:53:09
Speaker
your best faith effort to make sure you're respecting everyone involved. And if someone brings up that you're doing it wrong, just apologize and figure it out from there. Right. Now, I do want to touch on a little bit. We've got a couple minutes left.
Comparative Educational Approaches in Archaeology
00:53:25
Speaker
So before we all have to say our goodnight are some countries that have had a little bit better success rate with
00:53:35
Speaker
having their collections utilized. And I'm particularly thinking about the Twitter conversation that John Lowe instigated, where there did seem to be a fairly sharp divide between US scholars and European scholars, particularly scholars from the United Kingdom, in that a lot of the individuals from the United Kingdom were stating
00:54:02
Speaker
that they did a lot more work with their collections as part of master's thesis, as part of dissertation work, just kind of in general. And there seems to be both a different outlook towards collections. But some of it is also very practical in that, at least for PhDs, the average PhD in the US
00:54:22
Speaker
in anthropology. Last time I checked, which admittedly was a couple years ago, it was seven to ten years, which also is just a startlingly large amount of time. In the UK, it's really three to four. It is three to five. Oftentimes, it is
00:54:39
Speaker
funded for three the fourth year they're not going to give you any money but they're not going to charge you tuition and if you hang around for five they are going to start charging you tuition and if you're still there after six you better have a really good reason because oftentimes you have to convince the department not to just terminate your program and say you're done and some of that is that
00:54:59
Speaker
a lot of those PhD programs don't require classes. They assume that if you have a master's and most PhD programs, you are required to have a master's to go into, or at least the ones I had investigated. But they figure if you have a master's, you took classes for your master's and you should know what you're talking about. So you kind of just jump in to do research from the get-go. But if you only have three years to figure out plan, propose, research,
00:55:24
Speaker
and write up a dissertation, you don't have time for two, three, four, five years of field seasons. That's true. The graduate program that I did, I haven't looked at if it's still this way, was an accelerated two years master's program with a terminal master's.
00:55:41
Speaker
Mine too. They wanted everyone out in two to two and a half. They are really annoyed if it was three or more. And so I think we did end up with a lot. And it was like all the anthropologies. But the archaeology, I think we ended up doing a lot with collections. And that was part of it was because look, this is right here. You can be done. This is what we can give you money for. Okay.
00:56:06
Speaker
We need this properly back so we can go out to the lab and stop paying money for this thing over here. I can do that. Give me money. Okay. My program is the same way. There are so many people doing collections based projects at the local museum, the Museum of Northern Arizona, which had a beautiful collection facility. And there are a lot of people who did pottery analysis, all kinds of projects. And yeah, I gave them a great opportunity to
00:56:33
Speaker
For one thing, like Deidre, it was a two year program. They wanted you out so you had a great collection to work with and get on out of there. I want you in here, I want you out there, spreading our university name all over. Exactly. Like smooshing everywhere. And now, you know, I'll get it's been a decade since my master's and I'll run into, you know, fresh
00:56:59
Speaker
you know, fresh field text. And they're like, Oh, yeah, I went there and I did this. I was like, Oh, so did I. I could probably put together a whole crew of people just from that program because, you know, it was accelerated. And especially a lot of the archaeologists that were there when I started the professors had been CRM archaeologists before their professors. Mm hmm.
00:57:23
Speaker
And so they really liked, look at my little ducklings. I will pull them from the field and bring them on high to do other things. You don't want to go into academia. There's a connection. Do some work. Very good. It's my interpretation. Figure it out. You're an adult. Okay. Thank you.
00:57:47
Speaker
I mean, figuring out the interpretations can be difficult for collections work. I have certainly met archaeologists in the past who really, they like digging. And when you start talking about interpretations, they're like, oh, but I dug, and I can write a site report about all the things and make profile walls. And that's like pooping and not wiping your butt.
00:58:11
Speaker
But there are people who exist to do that. That's true. This is going downhill. For sure, you made this huge mess. Now what? So what are you going to do with this huge mess you just made? You got to clean it up. You got to get it ready for a collection. You got to put it in the collection. What's it mean? It's a pile of rocks right now. Figure it out.
00:58:40
Speaker
And if you're not good at wiping your own butt, make sure you're partnered with someone that can, you know? Those partnerships exist for a reason, but you gotta find them. Yeah. Divide and conquer. Yup. Yup. So collections. Anyways. Yeah. Someone has to handle the bags and bags of broken glass.
00:59:08
Speaker
and all the bent nails. We are approaching that magical 60-minute mark. All right. So if anyone has any final thoughts as we are all? I'm tapped out. Yes, clearly dealing with the effect of late nights and exhaustion.
00:59:30
Speaker
collections are important. They're important to preserve and they're important to go back and look at because every time some new eyes look on it, even if it's the same eyes, now that they're older, you're going to find something and all of that is good data. You never step in the same river twice. Sorry, I didn't mean to step on you. I think that's
00:59:49
Speaker
A good point I would also like to add, we didn't really touch on this so much, but we did talk a little bit about how collections are sometimes these days people are debating selling them because they can't take care of them. A big part of being able to take care of collections is having the money to do so and whether that takes
01:00:10
Speaker
the place of the $20 a week bench fee that you have to pay some places to go work on their collections. And yes, you can get funding to pay for that for you. So whether it's that or when people are applying to funding agencies to try and get funds to work on these collections and conserve them being able to say, hey, that people are interested in
01:00:37
Speaker
coming and looking at our collection. And I can say that because we've had this many people come work on our collection or this many people ask about working on our collection. Those things matter. And if you're one of those wonderful, beautiful people capable of approving funding for collections, you can be at a point on the forefront of archeology by looking back at the collection.
01:01:04
Speaker
If you are one of those beautiful people and would like to reach out, our email is within our couch, podcastgmail.com. We would love to hear that of the overthrow of capitalism, but funding right now a little easier.
01:01:23
Speaker
On that note, I think we will say goodnight. Thank you so much for joining me tonight. As always, it is a pleasure and I look forward to talking to you all again soon. Goodnight everybody. Goodnight.
01:01:46
Speaker
We hope you have enjoyed the show. Please be sure to subscribe and rate our show wherever you listen. We are available on iTunes, Stitcher, and probably whatever your favorite podcasting app is. Remember to like and share. If you have questions or comments, you can post them in the comment section for the show at the Women in Archaeology page on the Archaeology Podcasting Network site, or email them to us at womeninarchaeologypodcast.com. This show is part of the Archaeology Podcasting Network,
01:02:14
Speaker
and is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle. You can reach them at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. Music for the show was Retro Future by Kevin MacLeod, available at Incomtep and Royalty Free Music. Thanks for listening.
01:02:34
Speaker
The show is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com