Digging in to history

Like the warehouse in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," the University of Arkansas Museum Collections facility contains treasures of depth, breadth and variety -- 7 million pieces, more or less, according to Mary Suter, curator of collections at the Fayetteville facility.

Only rarely does the public get an opportunity to visit the diverse collection, which ranges from Mississippian Period pottery to Mexican masks to quartz crystals the size of baseballs, baskets, sieves, carriers, storage bags, sandals, moccasins, bags and rawhide strips from Ozark bluff shelters and 1,250 skeletons of mammals and birds.

One of those tours is scheduled for 7 p.m. Tuesday as part of the celebration of Arkansas Archeology Month by the local Ko-ko-ci Chapter of the Arkansas Archeological Society.

Marilyn Knapp has just completed a two-year term as president of the state organization, which boasts more than 600 members from inside and outside of Arkansas. Founded in the mid-1990s, the local chapter is open to members of the state society and anyone else interested in the field of archeology.

Knapp said she came to archeology through a passion more for people than for pottery shards. Her bachelor's degree is in anthropology, and she is fascinated by the diversity of humanity as reflected in what is left behind.

"My family and I went down to Mexico and I started reading about the archeology down there -- Mayans and Aztecs -- because I wanted to be smart about what I was looking at," she remembered. "And it was amazing! At the time we lived in Minnesota, then my (former) husband got transferred down here. All of a sudden, I discovered the (Arkansas Archeological Survey) and the society, and I thought, 'I can go digging -- and they're going to train me? And I get to get dirty and have fun?

"The stuff in Mexico is pretty much all above ground," she added. "This stuff in Arkansas is underground, but you can still find houses and all kinds of artifacts. So there's that people connection, past and present. Society people are members of my family. My current husband and I have volunteered a lot of hours and have had a lot of fun doing it."

For Knapp, the best moments always involve the people.

"I've never personally found anything super-interesting in the ground," she said. "We discover stains in the ground, called features, and those are wonderful. But when somebody I'm supervising who is new or not so new finds something unique and rare? That look on their face is priceless. I always love that."

Suter said she sees similar expressions when visitors tour the Museum Collections facility.

"We tend to surprise people," she said simply.

"One of the fun things people always like is our collection of military uniforms – we have a really good collection," she said. "A lot of people know we have a large pressed glass collection because they saw it on exhibit in Old Main, so we like to show them that so they know it's still here. And we like to show them the ethnographic collections," including not only "a really nice Mexican mask collection" but "ceremonial and decorative objects from the South Pacific islands, and decorative objects made by the Plains Indians. Smaller collections are representative of China, South Korea, and the Middle East," as the website describes.

The facility also houses the Hugh D. Miser Collection of 5,725 Arkansas and Brazilian quartz crystals, 10,500 North American and European invertebrate fossil specimens plus 4,800 North American vertebrate fossil specimens, strong collections in textiles, Arkansas crafts, glassware and ceramics, the fossil of a Pleistocene mammoth found northeast of Hazen in 1965 and a 180-million-year old fossil crocodile from Germany.

Although the lobby of the Museum Collections building displays many pieces of Native American ceramics, "the archeology is boxed up, the ethnographic objects are all in cabinets, so Tuesday we'll give (visitors) a behind-the-scenes tour and show them how we store things and take care of things -- and the full breadth of what we have, hopefully," Suter said.

The rest of the time, the collections are available for loan to other institutions, most recently including Arkansas State University, the Rogers Historical Museum, the Historic Arkansas Museum and the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, both in Little Rock, and are used for research.

"We have a (scholar) from the Smithsonian looking at seeds from the bluff shelters," Suter said by way of example. "He's studying domestication of sunflower seeds. And just last week or so, the New York Times quoted Logan Kistler (a postdoctoral fellow in anthropological genomics at Penn State), who used gourds from our collections to reach the conclusions he did."

While Suter hopes to share what the facility holds, Knapp always hopes to whet the appetite of others. The Ko-ko-ci Chapter meets the second Tuesday of every month, usually at the Arkansas Archeological Survey.

"All of our meetings are open to the public. You can come and not have to pay anything, and maybe you'll want to join later. We kind of leave the door open that way."