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One of the most important and frequently used collections in the museum includes the millions of artifacts accumulated since the turn of the century from California and Nevada archaeological sites. The collection, which includes artifacts of stone, bone, textiles, ceramics, paleoethnobiological remains, and the associated archives, has been the focus of curatorial reconditioning for the last six years making the collection both more easily accessible and more stable for the future. Under my direction as many as 15 to 20 undergraduate student interns work on CAP each academic year, mainly drawn from the Department of Anthropology, providing curatorial and laboratory style experience with the extremely diverse material culture of prehistoric and historic California. Few undergraduates can get this kind of experience anywhere else, and many students return semester after semester, some even coming in as volunteers after graduation. In a few words, I will talk about the history of these archaeological collections, the kind of work that characterizes CAP, and the prospects for the future.
Housed mainly in Hearst Gym Basement (California archaeological sites), and Kroeber Hall (Nevada archaeological sites), the collections form the material remains of most of the archaeological research that took place in California and Nevada prior to the 1960s. UC Berkeley, and the UC Archaeological Survey, later known as the Archaeological Research Facility, functioned as the recording center and curatorial facility for archaeological projects from San Diego County in the south to Modoc County in the north. The facility was actively maintained until the advent of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) of 1970 which essentially put the recording and curatorial responsibility California's archaeology under the authority of the State Historic Preservation Office in Sacramento and regional or county clearinghouses. So, the collections housed here have become important historical resources themselves; ones that are used frequently by researchers working under the above federal and state mandates.
The vast majority of the collections are the result of Professor R.F. Heizer's and his student's research in the 1950s and 1960s. Some are from even earlier researchers, who excavated a number of sites around San Francisco Bay beginning with N.C. Nelson, Max Uhle, W.D. Strong, Joseph Peterson, and others mainly working under Phoebe Hearst's funding. The earliest, and perhaps most important, was Nelson, and Uhle's work at the Emeryville Shellmound (CA-ALA-309). We have a manuscript in the collection on this site by Max Uhle dated to 1902. So, in less than seven years, the California Archaeology collection here will be one-hundred or more years old.
In the 1940s while E.W. Gifford was director of the museum, the collections underwent their first major re-curation effort. Artifacts were placed in small and large cardboard matchboxes, glass jars, cigar boxes, and other containers and organized by site and region. This effort continued through the 1950s. Unfortunately, unknown in that day, the cardboard that was used at that time was not a stable, acid-free paper, and consequently by 1990 when the project began, many of the organic artifacts (shell beads, bone, charred textiles) had begun to degrade quite badly due to the acids in the paper. This, then, became the focus of the California Archeology Project: to stabilize the collection and curate it in such a manner that it would be both more stable and easier to use by researchers. Six years, and millions of objects later, we are almost finished with that portion of the project, but there is much more yet to do.
CAP is funded on a shoestring with general museum funds, and a generous "endowment" by Dr. William and Edith Wallace that supports a graduate student "crew chief" each year. These graduate students are all doing work in New World archaeology, and our current recipient, Gwen Stoeger, stoeger@qal.berkeley.edu is a North American historic archaeologist. During the course of the semester each old tray of artifacts in Hearst Gym is removed and the contents inventoried against the catalog ledger. Any discrepancies are corrected, and the material is repackaged in modern packaging, mainly plastics, and many objects are physically protected against future damage using foam cushioning, and in many cases new trays. Instead of having to wade through opaque cardboard boxes and disturbing other objects, a researcher now can see most objects in their transparent plastic containers and handle only those objects of interest. In this way we have packaged the objects more safely, decreased the handling time, and hence increased the life of the object.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL MANUSCRIPTS (PDF)
During excavation, most of the archaeological remains were meticulously recorded in the field. This included plan and profile maps of the site, field notes, photographs, official site record sheets, correspondence, and miscellaneous items. We have also just completed a detailed computerized inventory of the manuscripts in both text and database formats. This now allows us to determine what written material we have in the collection for any given site or region in response to internal and external queries. We are currently working on a grant proposal to physically preserve these very important materials by digitizing the text and photos as a way to permanently store the collections.
We have accomplished much on the CAP project, but there is still much to do. A curatorial project is never really finished, but forms a continuum of work to constantly upgrade the storage and asses its condition. Future work will focus on the inventory and electronic filing of the field map collection and site record sheets, creating an electronic shelf list for the curated collections, and work on the Nevada site collections, some of the most important type sites in the Great Basin. By the time this phase is "completed" it will be time to institute new strategies to preserve this important museum collection for future generations of students, researchers, and Native Americans.
North American Archaeology
Introduction to Museum Research
Research Past, Present and Future
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