Just the artifacts, Ma'am

Shannen Robson was taking a critical look at a set of small, buff-colored boxes she had just constructed from stiff cardboard. Each held an artifact: a buffalo-hide moccasin, an arrow point, a heel-worn sandal made of yucca fiber.

She needed to be careful. She was working for the future, she said.The setting was an archaeological laboratory upstairs in the Utah Museum of Natural History on the campus of the University of Utah, where Robson is a curatorial assistant. The boxes were among a host of protective housings she has been building lately like props for baskets and padding to support fragile items.

Her job is to make sure that the museum's artifacts are preserved in fine condition for the next generation of researchers and museumgoers, and the next, and the next - a parade stretching far into the future, just as the bone awls and pottery chips connect her with the ancient people who made them centuries ago.

The archaeology lab is the site where a great project is going on quietly, the rehousing of artifacts collected through scores of expeditions carried out over many decade and items donated by private citizens. They range from Pomo Indian baskets woven 70 years ago in California to sandals from southern Utah dating back 1,000 years, to stone tools from a cave near Wendover that are nearly as old as any found in the Northern Hemisphere, 9,000 years.

The museum, located on the campus of the University of Utah, is doing the same type of assessments and careful repackaging of its other collections. The collections are a diverse group, from butterflies impaled in the 1920s to dinosaur fossils and mineral specimens, from bison skulls to stuffed lizards. Altogether, the museum is going over a collection of half a million objects.

"We are stabilizing, cleaning, housing, researching and doing analytical reports," said Robson's boss, Kathy Kankainen, collections manager. Asked how long the project will take, she replied, "I don't know - past my lifetime, that's for sure."

If you could have peeked into one of the museum's storage areas 35 years ago, an archaeology lab in a surplus World War II barracks, you would have seen shelves groaning with a profusion of black and white Anasazi pottery, ancient baskets, grindstones. Inside the drawers of cabinets you would have seen ancient tools of every description.

There would have been "things stored on wooden shelves that were vulnerable to dust, insects, light humidity, temperature changes," Kankainen said.

All that is changing, explained Nancy Coulam, regional archaeologist for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.