Steve Nash
Harold Henderson: Most of your objects have tracking numbers. Are there a lot that still don’t?
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HH: I know it’s more fun to go out in the field than to stay home and organize last year’s finds, but why did he leave that work undone?
SN: He almost always wrote up his fieldwork within a year. But he only cataloged those items that he wrote about and, for whatever reason, he didn’t publish all the sites he excavated. Also, his collecting practices changed as the field of archaeology changed. At first anthropologists only collected exhibition-worthy, intact artifacts. Later they realized fragments and animal bones had informational value as well. By the 60s they were collecting debitage [stone chips left over from toolmaking]. We have 85,000 pieces from one site alone. It takes up space, and will it ever be analyzed?
HH: You’re telling me that this great stuff wasn’t cataloged?
SN: Our goal is to produce a database that includes standardized names (as well as the various original names), digital images of each object, descriptions of most, and connections to the locations, field notes, photographs, and movie films–all online in English and Arabic, and ultimately connected with the Ashmolean and Iraqi portions of the collection.
HH: How’d that happen? I thought the feds quit giving museums money for organizing stuff they already own.
