In September 2021, a team of four collections staff from DMNS traveled to Austin for two weeks to pack the WS Ranch collection, an Ancestral Puebloan site in New Mexico excavated in the 1970s and 80s and accessioned by DMNS in 2018. Over the course of six days, DMNS staff reboxed the collection, labeled and weighed each box, staged all 560 boxes in stacks, and then loaded them onto 18 pallets. The collection spent two weeks in a -20 degrees C freezer to kill any potential pest infestations and was then transported to Denver. It will be processed and cataloged over the next two years with a $297,271 Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In June 2020, DMNS received a $150,000 National Endowment for the Humanities CARES grant to partially support salaries for 10 staff to document, move, and rehouse 3200 objects from the African and Central and South American collections into the Avenir Collections Center. This collection had particular needs in that it was the least researched and understood subcollection in the Anthropology department, so we knew we would encounter unknowns and surprises. The project scope also included data cleanup and improving intellectual control of the collection. This grant created a unique opportunity for the humanities staff at DMNS to focus on a shared, single goal.
The Anthropology department has a unique box and cavity design that is totally adhesive-free; the entire mount is held together with friction and gravity. The new preservation space in the Avenir Collections Center, which opened in 2013, is designed to accommodate current and future collections with custom-made mounts for every artifact. Over 50 volunteers help the department with rehousing the collection. The collections are then organized in the cabinets by geographic region and culture group, which facilitates better access for researchers and indigenous groups.
In 2017, DMNS received a $300,000 SCHC grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to move and rehouse the entire archaeology collection. In the first year of the grant, activities focused on rehousing the whole ceramics, which were the most fragile and required individually customized boxes like the ethnology collection. We then focused on bagging smaller items such as lithics, sherds, bone, and vials of botanical material, designing a sophisticated bagging and filing system by state, county, and site.
With so many artifacts moving around in the collections spaces, a more efficient system was needed to update locations in the database. The barcode system I designed and implemented uses a unique random number with a prefix indicating an object, a holder box, or a location. Crystal Reports then generates a printable label that uses a Code 39 font. The scanner is a Stimare sleeve and iPod touch, and updates are made through a web form called Sapphire, which immediately updates the database over wifi.