Curating Blog #1 | Native American Artifacts

This week I started my project with the Antique Automobile Museum in Hershey, PA. One of their main contributors passed away and unknowingly was a huge collector of Native American artifacts (other than antique cars). It is my job for the next few months to curate over 4,000 artifacts. That means cleaning, preserving, cataloging, and appraising. Once all of these pieces are organized we will begin creating our exhibit to house the artifacts. How the AACA is going to incorporate artifacts with antique cars is by way of a Route 66 idea. It is extremely important that myself, as well as others, preserve these pieces to the best of our abilities and to ensure that we do not offend the Native American peoples. For myself, this is the perfect way to help preserve my heritage and to pay respects to my ancestors. 

To begin, handling ancient artifacts is a meticulous thing. All pieces need to be treated equally. You have to make sure that the materials in which you use to handle these pieces are either made from organic materials or are not processed in any way. A HUGE mistake is touching a natural object with a chemical object. This is what happened when the contributors 'helpers' packaged his artifacts. They were all covered in green bubble wrap, packaging tape, or peanuts. Over time this will eat away at what is left of the artifacts. Unfortunately, this is how a lot of pieces are ruined. People are not taking the proper care or are misinformed on how to care for them. Even touching with your bare hands can cause risk though not as much as processed materials. 

This is an extremely tedious process and will be quite cumbersome. 

Here is my favorite piece so far:

Native American Pueblo Pottery

What we have here is American Indian Pueblo Pottery; most notably from Southwestern America due to Spaniard arrival over 400 years ago. These vessels were used mostly for utilitarian purposes and not so much for artistic appreciation. Therefore, pottery is one of the hardest artifacts to study but as you can see, we have a beautiful piece luckily still in tact. With the force of Christianity, Indians were banned from using pottery in spiritualistic manners. That being said, they were only allowed to use pottery for laborious tasks; cooking, storing goods, etc.  

I will be adding more artifacts to new posts once I am done conducting my research. I will also be providing value guide information and updates on my research.