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 The
Nevada State Museum in Carson City is located in a former United States
Branch Mint building. It houses and displays collections relating to the
State, the mint, natural history, mining, and archeology.
The museum houses
a number of different collections. There are objects that have been recovered
from both current and historical archeological excavations. The anthropology
collections include stone tools like spear, dart, and arrow points. There
are also perishable items such as wooden and cordage artifacts, footwear
– including ancient sandals that go back 10000 years ago, and the
famous Lovelock duck decoys. The Native American Basketry is considered
by many to be the highlight of the museum.
When artifacts are
recovered from the field they are placed in individual containers and
brought back to the lab where they are processed. If they are really dirty
and the residue on the artifact is unimportant, they are washed and then
labeled with pigment based inks. The label corresponds to a catalog entry.
The artifacts are then studied and analyzed by the archeologist to complete
a report of findings from the archeological site. Both the position of
the artifact in the ground and the actual artifact itself are important
in determining who occupied a site and the context the articles found
at that site had in their lives. Finally, the items are either stored
in the collection areas or, if they are deemed worthy, they are put on
display.
More
about the Nevada State Museum:
The most spectacular finds were the earlier ones. Most of these, dating
from the 1930s, were for purely research purposes. Today, excavations
are more likely to be salvage or compliance work and artifacts are more
likely to be historical: tin cans, bottles, tools, etc.- Diagnostic artifacts
tell you what people were at a site, when they were there, and what
they did.
- Ethnic markers
are artifacts that point to a particular ethnic group that may have
occupied a site. These may include: eating utensils, eating containers,
food containers, currency, coins, and liquor bottles.
- The cleaning of
artifacts is done by trained conservators. The Nevada State Museum will
lightly dust the objects with a camel hair brush and a vacuum cleaner
hose nearby covered with cheese cloth so the dust goes into the vacuum
that way. If an item needs extensive cleaning it is sent to specialists.
- To optimize storage
conditions, the museum tries to minimize the amount of light that the
item is exposed to and also tries to regulate the humidity for that
object.
- The vault at the
Nevada State Museum once housed 1,180 baskets. In order to more properly
store the baskets, that number is being reduced to between 500 and 700.
- An ethic within
archeology is to preserve part of a dig. It is hoped that with newer,
more advanced testing techniques archeologists of the future will be
able to answer still more questions and try to solve even more of the
secrets of the past.
 Eugene
Hattori, PH.D:
“I’m very interested in the technology of production and trying
to determine ancient affiliation. I’m interested in trying to determine
how a basket relates to other pre-historic cultures, and how this all
fits together to tell us about other ancient cultures. My research in
the past has been about looking at the interrelationship of people and
the environment, how that might have influenced the movement of people
in and out of the area, and how that might have influenced trade between
this area and other areas principal to the west.”
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