Archeology lab leads way in preservation

Tim Baumann stares transfixed at a small, dusty piece of broken pottery. The object is imprinted with half-crescent designs that were made by someone’s fingernail.

“Look at this personal connection,” he said, placing his own fingernails in the markings. “I’m touching exactly where they once touched.”

Baumann, the curator of Collections at the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archeology, described this as his passion — getting to know ancient people.

The Laboratory of Archeology at IU, somewhat out of view on the side streets of campus, breeds that kind of passion; a passion that is based on a legacy.

The laboratory was established in 1965 thanks to a large endowment from Eli Lilly. While most know Lilly for his booming pharmaceutical business, Lilly was quite the archeologist.

In fact, he is considered to be the founder of Indiana archeology, Baumann said.
Today the lab is run almost completely on an additional endowment from Lilly.  The lab houses more than 10,000 collections that date back to the late 19th century. The collections are made up of millions of artifacts, almost too many to count.

Lilly is responsible for everything that the lab and the program has and does, said Interim Director and Senior Research Scientist at the lab, William Monaghan.

But that legacy is in danger of being lost as records and artifacts decay with time.
While the main role of the laboratory staff members is to conduct research in the field of archeology, a perhaps more important role is preserving what has already been found.

“We have to take care of these artifacts forever,” Monaghan said. “Not for a year, not for a century, but forever.”

Monaghan pulls out a tattered box from the stacks. The box is filled with artifacts from Angel Mounds that are wrapped in paper bags. On those paper bags is an ink stamp explaining the history and properties of each item. This box is one of the hundreds stacked in the small room in the basement of the lab.

“Every minute it sits here, it’s disappearing,” Monaghan said. “We can’t do the science if we lose the history.”

The lab is currently searching for a grant that will enable them to revamp the collections. The ink stamps need to be archived and the artifacts need to be repackaged in acid-free containers, Baumann said.

“We’re trying to be like Eli Lilly and carry on his legacy,” Baumann said. “But we’re just not as rich.”

He estimated the project would cost a few million dollars.

“I just hope they listen,” Monaghan said, gently sliding the box back into place.
Once a grant is obtained the project will likely take a few years to complete.

Updating and preserving is crucial because the laboratory contains some of the most developed and extensive collections in the world. For example, the lab has the largest collection of negative painted pots, where color is added by making prints.

The lab sees researchers that come from all over to study records and objects. The lab also houses material from nearly every federal agency that owns land in Indiana.

In October the lab will see research archeologists from all over the world at the Midwest Archeological Conference. A conference of that scale has not happened since 1978.

“We hope a new summary volume on Indiana archeology will come out of that,” Monaghan said. “The last time that was done was in 1937 because of Eli Lilly.”

For Baumann preserving the artifacts is about preserving a culture.

“Material culture is the way to get at and understand the culture of the people.”