When I accepted an internship position at the Texas Historical Commission’s Historic Sites Division in August, I was excited for the opportunity to work in an environment that could utilize my background in both history and in anthropology. I was curious about what the real world applications of my studies would be and how the interplay between the two fields would be navigated. Academically, there is a great deal of similarity between the two subjects, but I questioned whether that similarity would transcend its theoretical underpinnings and manifest in practical applications. Fortunately, the wide range of opportunities provided to me gave me ample evidence that there is overlap between the fields. However, it also showed me that there are many positive lessons that the two disciplines still have to learn from one another.
The majority of my internship responsibilities revolved around the documentation and preparation for long-term curation of artifacts from Fort Lancaster. Because of its role as a military fort, the artifacts that have been recovered from Fort Lancaster are primarily military or trade in nature. The majority of the materials that have been recovered are ferrous, or iron-based, artifacts. Door hinges, wagon hardware, and nails are common items in the Fort Lancaster collection. Iron breaks down slowly in the soil and is able to withstand the harsh environmental conditions in west Texas; so archeologists come across iron artifacts frequently when excavating historic sites. Other items in the collection include bottles, broken pottery, and various military uniform notions such as buttons or medals, which are encountered in various degrees of preservation depending on their material composition and the areas in which they are found.
The items found on the site serve to illustrate the day-to-day life of the inhabitants of the fort. Historic records are frequently remiss in detailing the domestic and social lives of frontier inhabitants. Finding bottles can illuminate what type of remedies that fort inhabitants used to how much alcohol they consumed. Uniform buttons can be used to trace where the uniforms of the soldiers were tailored and give archaeologists and historians a glimpse into the travels and lives of soldiers before they were sent to the frontier. The prevalence of canning jars compared to tin cans can indicate the importance of food production on the site. Each item provides a different insight and clarifies the picture of what life was like decades ago.
In order to garner this information, though, the artifacts have to be made accessible to historians and archaeologists to analyze. That is where my job at the Historic Sites Division comes in. Artifacts are in a state of consistent degradation and that process is accelerated by frequent handling and improper storage. So to increase the preservation of an artifact (and to make it accessible to more people), curators produce a large amount of documentation that provides pertinent information without the researcher having to access the artifact directly. My internship has been involved with producing this documentation. I began my internship after the collection had already passed through the hands of multiple interns and had been reviewed by the collections manager, Kerri Wilhelm. My final review of the collection was done to bring all of the previous work into a cohesive whole and to assure that it would meet all of the requirements that the facility’s certifier would be looking for.
I had to make sure that the artifacts were all individually labeled with both the number that had been assigned to them by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (the previous manager of the collection) and the number that they were given by the THC when the Texas Historical Commission became responsible for their management. This allows for easy identification of any artifact within the collection. Every item had to be bagged and packaged in materials that would assure that it could be stored safely. The packaging was entirely dependent on the artifact and various materials and objects required different methods of packaging. Most ceramic pieces had to be stored in boxes I constructed to their specific dimensions out of curatorial materials that were chemically neutral and would not off-gas. Bottles had to be wrapped in special tissue and then in a material called ethafoam which is also chemically neutral and serves as a foam cushion around the bottle. Paper and metals all had to be treated differently.
The amount of work that goes into a single artifact alone is staggering. While I worked at the Wheless lab, I documented and prepared for storage one of the antebellum infantry uniform buttons from Fort Lancaster. It was also the item that I conducted the most background research upon. The item had gone through the conservation process at the Texas A&M Conservation Resource Laboratory to stabilize the metal and prevent further corrosion of it. It had also been measured, photographed, and the initial documentation on it had already been started by previous interns.
With my internship now coming to a close, these are the issues at the forefront of my mind. The similarities and overlap that I saw between history and archaeology theory are still there, but in the overworked and under-budgeted world of state archaeology theoretical knowledge has come into conflict with its practical applications. While archaeology can serve to fill in neglected areas of history and history can provide information into people’s motivations, they are often not given the opportunity to. Instead, it is simply a struggle to maintain control over the information that may some day have a purpose. It is my hope, though, that as students familiar with the inter-disciplinary approach to anthropology and history filter into the institutions and as an increasing number of archaeologists begin adopting practices involved with historic archaeology that some real change can be affected.