The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has the arduous task of managing all state parks within the state of Texas. This entails running the actual park facilities themselves as well as managing them on an aggregate level and making decisions about how they should be run. I am proud to say that the department is very protective not only of Texas’s natural heritage, but of its cultural heritage as well.
This is where the archeology lab comes into play. Nearly every state park contains remnants of the past from the prehistoric to the historic periods. Texas Parks and Wildlife has a memorandum of understanding with the Texas Historical Commission, which serves as the steward for Texas historical landmarks and artifacts. This means that when cultural remains are discovered within a state park, development in that area must cease until a full archaeological reconnaissance (and occasionally excavation) is completed. Whatever artifacts are extracted from the site are sent to TPWD Archeology Lab for curation. Here, they are placed into acid-free boxes and stored in the massive collections room where they can remain secure and ready for analysis, whether that takes place today or a hundred years from now.
As an interesting side note, most of the boxes in the collections room are from excavations that happened decades ago- in effect, they are artifacts themselves. One can dig through these boxes and get a glimpse of the archaeological past- before more advanced processes of curation were developed. The lab is thus quite an intriguing place to ponder the history of historical and archaeological analysis.
My main job this summer has been to update and repackage the Fort Richardson collection. Fort Richardson was a frontier fort built to protect white settlers in Texas from Indian raids, and was active from 1868 to 1879. The town of Jacksboro, Texas popped up around the fort, and it was acquired by Texas Parks and Wildlife in 1970. Excavations were first conducted that year and subsequent seasons saw several more rounds of extraction. The most numerous artifact types are square cut nails (representing a nail manufacturing technology that was replaced by wire nails in the late 1800s) and window and bottle glass. While these materials are not exactly exciting to count and package, many far more interesting artifacts found their way into the collection. Bullets and other ordnance, personal items such as bone toothbrushes and combs, and other miscellaneous artifacts paint a picture of human life at the fort.
Many of these personal items have been incorporated into a new exhibit planned for the Fort Richardson museum entitled “From the Archeological Collections”. Those who manage the site directly want to show visitors some of the non-military aspects of frontier fort life. Items such as the bone toothbrush, along with marbles, iron keys and a padlock, and ink bottle, and several other personal items will surely demonstrate to the visitor that while the soldiers had intense military duties, they were also given a fair amount of free time.
While updating the inventory, we came across many artifacts that were included in this exhibit. However, the creation of an exhibit was not the only reason we are updating the collection.
Our MOU with the Texas Historical Commission includes a the that all of the materials collected from archaeological sites on TPWD property (State Parks, Wildlife Management Areas, and Fish Hatcheries) must be archived according to the standards set by the Texas Antiquities Code. Along with guidelines such as proper temperature and humidity of the storage room, the Code requires that artifacts be bagged in modern archival acid free bags. This means that the collections, many of which have been stored for several decades, must now be updated and repackaged. Thus, our main purpose this summer has been to help speed up the process of catching up to modern standards of curation.
The Fort Richardson materials were a clear example of a collection that needed work. Opening a single box from this historic frontier fort will demonstrate why the repackaging needs to be done. Most of the artifacts were counted (and thus separated) at the time the original inventory was done, but then thrown together into the same plastic bag. Often falling apart, these bags are secured only by a twist-tie. Some artifacts are stored in only paper lunch bags, and one group was even held in a 1970s-era Dairy Queen cup. We store over 1,000 boxes full of artifacts that were placed there in the 1970s, before curation standards were even set.
Sitting at desks, we sort through artifacts lot by lot and cross reference what is actually there with what the inventory says should be there. There are often discrepancies between the inventory and the actual count of artifacts, and artifacts were often originally hastily misidentified. Once the artifacts are placed in their new bags, they are placed in bins according to artifact type and degree of specialty. In the example of Fort Richardson, most of the artifacts are nails and broken glass. So, we separate the different types of nails (square cut vs. wire) and different colors and types of glass (clear bottle, brown bottle, flat or window).
After this, the relatively small number of artifacts remaining fit into their own distinct categories. One category, ferrous metal objects, contains any non-nail iron object. This can range from screws to hinges to horseshoes. Any non-ferrous (copper, bronze, lead, zinc, aluminum, etc.) metal is separated, and usually consists of bullet casings, grommets, and foil. Several other categories exist for items such as organics (bone, shell, wood, etc.) and ceramics. Items that are considered special include bullets and other armaments, buttons both military and civilian, or any item thought to be personal in use, from a toothbrush to a toy horse. These are the items that can readily tell us something about the lives of the people who lived at the site.
In the past, these categories were followed very strictly and scientifically according to a standardized code of categorization known as Sprague Codes. This system is named after the historic archaeologist who had the idea that classification schemes in historic archaeology should be reflective of the amount of knowledge we have of the historic era, as opposed to the prehistoric era. This means that instead of simply classifying artifacts by the material of manufacture, as is typically done in prehistoric archaeology, artifacts are placed into functional categories. In this scheme, for example, there could be two different horseshoes that are nearly identical but classified separately because one functioned as an actual horseshoe and the other was a door decoration. These items would be given specific trinomials according to the Sprague Code master sheet, which is dozens of pages long and divides artifacts into every conceivable category.
The result of classifying in this manner inevitably leads to burying oneself in minutiae. Today, we classify artifacts according to material of manufacture, but divide by function within those categories. Thus, while the essential idea of the Sprague Codes is still adhered to, the actual classification scheme is far more efficient and pragmatic.
The TPWD Archaeology Lab is an excellent place to begin a career because it is a microcosm of mega-repositories such as UT’s TARL (Texas Archeological Research Laboratory). Lab work is also good preparation for field work, because it directly demonstrates how mistakes in the field can lead to confusion in the lab. Mostly, this experience has taught me how archaeology is done in a realistic setting. I feel privileged to have obtained an internship at a state department which seems to really value its history and its heritage. Cultural preservation and understanding of the past are things that I feel passionate about, and TPWD’s Archeology Lab was the right environment for me to gain enough experience that I can make an impact.