Austin Parisi, Center for Archaeological Studies

An Internship at CAS: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

Parisi CAS

This semester I have been interning at Texas State’s Center for Archaeological Studies located in room 120 of the Trinity building on the Texas State campus. The Center for Archaeological Studies, or CAS, is a curation facility which accepts collections from outside sources such as the Texas Historical Commission, as well as collections from Texas State’s own projects. The center prepares the collections for storage in a temperature controlled room, and inputs all of the information on the collections and artifacts into a program used by curation facilities and museums, called Past Perfect.

I decided to do my internship at CAS simply because of my uncertainty about my future plans. Graduate school is a possibility, but I have no idea what or where I would like to study. CAS seemed like a useful tool in helping me make further decisions. Learning the ins and outs of the curation process and the on goings of a curation facility could teach me widely applicable skills, and that is what I wanted most out of my internship. Whether I ended up studying Viking archaeology in Europe or working at any museum, being proficient in programs like Past Perfect would give me the knowledge I need to keep my options open when I set out on my quest for a career.

In my report I will discuss the artifact accession process, the part I played in that process, as well as my qualms with the entire experience as suggested by the title of my report, and what that meant to me personally.

Accessioning

Firstly, when an agency has a collection they need to be curated, they contact a facility such as CAS. The agency must fill out paperwork detailing the contents of the collection and make sure that their collection meets the requirements set by CAS for a collection to be accepted for curation. When CAS gives their approval then the agency can send the collection with all associated materials to be curated and put into storage.

The next step is taking an inventory of the collection. This is the first of many steps in which we are required to go through each and every item in a collection during the accessioning process. To do the initial inventory someone would sit down with an inventory sheet with all the items in the collection listed and check off every item in the collection. This ensures that there are no missing or undocumented artifacts. If we find that there was something missing or an additional artifact we then either deleted or created an object ID to account for the mistakes in the inventory list. After thee inventory the information for each item is put into an Excel spread sheet documenting object IDs, accession numbers, and provenience information, and that information is used to create Past Perfect entries for the artifacts.

Once the inventory is taken care of the artifacts need to be sorted and tagged. The artifacts are given new object ID labels to replace their old numbers and to fit into CAS’s system. The artifacts are usually sorted by type at this point. Most collections I worked with were separated into boxes labeled “lithic”, “faunal”, and “burned rock”.

After assigning object ID numbers and sorting, the artifacts are cleaned if need be. CAS has a large sink in the back of the building with toothbrushes to gently scrub artifacts clean. This helps prevent any damage or deterioration that may be caused by dirt.

The longest step of the process, and the one I spent the lion’s share of my internship doing, is making barcodes and assigning bag labels. This step alone usually took me multiple days per collection. I would sit down with boxes of artifacts and stacks of printed out barcodes. These barcodes, when scanned, pull up the artifacts’ Past Perfect entry for quick and easy access to information when you need it. I would then go through each and every artifact and match it with the corresponding barcode. Then I packed everything up again, labeled the boxes and they made their way to the shelves in the environmentally controlled storage room at CAS.

During the accessioning process, I only took part in very small parts throughout the semester. I did not really have a single project. I jumped around to different tasks for different collections. These tasks were mostly tedious busy work jobs, such as barcoding artifacts or sorting stacks of level summaries from 1984 field school excavations. On occasion I took photographs of artifacts and uploaded them to Past Perfect, but that was almost the full extent of my working with actual artifacts. I spent most of my time performing some menial task. The work I was doing was important and necessary work in order to curate collections properly, I just wish that I was put on a project with more thought involved instead of only being assigned very simple tasks with little thinking involved.

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for my experience, though, which brings me to what I feel is the most important thing about an internship; I believe the most useful thing about an internship is being able to decide if this work is actually something you would enjoy. I was able to get hands-on experience of real life archaeological work to better decide if this field is right for me. I no longer feel I am cut out for the line of work, but I would not have known that had I not done an internship. This is the most vital tool in making a serious decision such as a career, and I am very thankful that I was given the opportunity to work at CAS.

Conclusion

Although curation work is not the path I wish to follow, this experience was a great one for me, and I strongly recommend anyone else thinking about taking an internship to do so. Dr. Hadder is one of the most helpful and engaging professors, and the internship meetings with him make the internship worth taking. Talking to him about how to search for jobs with an anthropology degree was one of the most useful things I have learned in my college career, and I encourage anyone who needs some guidance about using your anthropology degree to participate in an internship with Dr. Hadder.