Internships Blog

Who knew Museum work could be fun? Engaging and entertaining days have been a staple of my time at the Salem Museum. With a friendly staff and a young internship coordinator, the Salem Museum knows how to make history fun and accessible, especially for its interns. While designing exhibits, researching, writing signs, and even accessioning artifacts, I often find myself laughing and making jokes along with my coworkers. Whether it be about the struggles of the editing tag-team of Kerstan and myself, or the stories we make up about some exhibits, we’re constantly finding ways to keep ourselves entertained and engaged in our work. The joviality of the Salem Museum is best described by the newly opened holiday toys exhibit. Throughout the Museum, we’ve set up a series of encased and interactive holiday toys for our guests to enjoy. The featured exhibit in this series is a model train/village display. After playing with an assortment of dolls, civil war figurines, and a frequently “quality-tested” game of arcade baseball, guests can make their way upstairs to the model train. Though they may be startled it’s motion-sense activation, all will love watching the train pass through a model of Salem, complete with its own Roanoke College! For a little extra fun, we made up stories for many of the figures in the display…and we encourage our guests to do the same! In all, the Salem Museum has done a perfect job of making history entertaining and engaging for all who visit.

 

Quality control testing of a civil war (feudal?) era sword.

Archaeology. Everyone makes different assumptions about what an archaeologists does and they’re rarely correct. An archaeologist does not dig up dinosaur bones; dinosaur bones are left to the paleontologists. Speaking of paleontologists, Ross Geller wasn’t an archaeologist either. But what about Indiana Jones? Wikipedia calls the classic character an archaeologist, but most people in the profession can’t say they’ve had to run from a rolling boulder. An archaeologist, put simply, studies cultures through their material remains. Sometimes that means studying human skeletons, but often the work entails sorting through what most people would consider trash.

Pictured is an example of my typical workspace during a day in the lab. Even the lab itself is simple, made up of tables and stacks of boxes scattered about. Our best tools? A pan of water, a toothbrush, some paper towel, a Sharpie, acid free bags and paper, patience, and not being afraid to ask questions take us a long way in the lab. Collections almost always need to be washed first. The goal is to make the artifact identifiable, not spotless. Artifacts are rarely going to be in mint condition in the way antique collectors seek out. Broken glass, lithic material, rusted nails, and ceramic sherds regularly cycle through the office. We begin by brushing off the excess soil with a dirt-stained toothbrush, dipping into the pan of water as necessary. We lay out each artifact onto sheets of paper towel to absorb the excess water, which we reuse to minimize waste. Then we place the artifact in a dry pan and use a complex drying system that involves placing the pan in the sunlight. In other words, the process doesn’t need to be high-tech or complicated to be effective. Once dry, the artifacts are sorted into bags, labeled on the outside of the bag and on a piece of paper inside designed not to disintegrate with time. Tom, our supervisor, writes up a report of the contents and the bags are placed into an acid free box to be sent off to Richmond for storage. And, yes, there’s always plenty of dirt to clean off the tables at the end of the day.

The work is time-consuming and relatively straightforward, but the simplicity of the process means ample opportunity to learn new things. Tom has been a brilliant supervisor, taking the time to show us different methods even if the artifacts don’t require it. A hot day spent working wasn’t so bad, for example, when he let us take out the float tank to learn how to separate charcoal from excess soil and organic material. I manage to leave the internship covered in dirt and sometimes water almost every time, whether we were in the field or not, because Tom encourages us to be hands-on. He takes the time to teach us about the history of the region and discuss what we want to do after we graduate. I don’t know if I’ll pursue archaeology career-wise, but the processes and people skills I have obtained will be advantageous regardless.

My internship at the Salem museum has been going well.  We have mostly been working on planning and implementing the museum wide christmas toys exhibit.  There has been a lot of help from the community, with donations of old toys streaming in.  Me and Tyler personally did the boys toys case and having been spent a lot of time building tinker toys into some of the designs on the manual.  I never expected to spend this much time playing with toys while working at the museum, and i’m not going to complain about it.  It has been super interesting to see old versions of toys that i grew up playing with, like a monopoly game styled off of the local area, or old toy soldiers that were hand made from wood and then lovingly painted.  We also spent a lot of time working on a model train set that normally would be placed under a tree, but this year will be located in the museum.  I am super excited for the exhibit to be done, because we have already had some kids come and play with the toys.  I think that museums often lack interactivity and care more about preservation than sharing the knowledge gathered.  I think the  event is going to be popular and attract a lot of visitors in, where they will not only learn about toys but about the rest of the history stored inside.  On a side note, I am no longer accessioning things (something I do not hate or really enjoy) so that the future intern can focus on their curatorial skills.

Cool Decorative doorknob donated to the museum.

The life of an intern is one of ever-changing duties. When there are a lot of things to get done, especially in a small organization, interns usually have to do a bunch of things to make life easier on the curator and other employees. The History Museum is currently doing a multitude of things, two of which I have been helping with this week. One is the set-up of Fantasyland, the Christmas exhibit the museum does. I spent a couple hours hanging up ornaments and snowflakes from the ceiling to add to the atmosphere of Christmas (too early in my opinion), and the rest of the afternoon was spent in collections doing inventory. The museum is in a tight spot where the collections will soon need to be moved, and much of what we have isn’t properly accessioned and the curator isn’t even aware of what all there is at the moment. The project I will be working on for the next few days is creating an inventory of kitchen appliances and utensils, and then boxing up the items to get them ready to move.

For many, archaeology is a hobby. The majority of the collections I’ve sorted in my time spent at the DHR have actually been donations of hobbyists that spend their free time looking for artifacts in Virginia. Some don’t have to look far at all, with their own farmlands having several sites untouched except for the occasional plowing. Pictured is the collection of a farmer we met not far from Lynchburg after he contacted us about having found some Native American artifacts on his farm. We had no idea just how expansive the collection would be.

We were floored when he presented to us a cabinet full of lithic tools, including axes, a range of projectile points still intact, and a few other relatively uncommon finds for the average collector. We were even more impressed to find out he kept them organized by location and had detailed, hand-drawn maps of their provenience. This level of organization isn’t always the case, as many people don’t realize any artifact becomes practically worthless without the provenience – especially when there’s a large black market for Native American artifacts, creating a lucrative business for people that know how to produce fakes.

Stone tool production isn’t nearly as hard as one would think, making creating fakes an attainable craft. Tom taught us to make our own projectile points, supplying us with deer bones and lithic material to practice on our own. I’ve discovered my stone tool production skills are not up to par but learning the process makes identifying artifacts in the field significantly simpler. A great deal of our time in the field often involves helping the landowner recognize what’s an artifact – whether it be the projectile point, shatter, or flakes – and what’s what Tom calls a “leave-it-right” … as in leave it right there because it’s just a rock. If you say “leave-it-right” fast and confidently enough, you can briefly trick someone into thinking they just found something spectacular. And, yes, he encourages us to make this joke with people as often as possible.

 

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More cemeteries. A drive out to Floyd County to drop off a flash drive to the Historical Society is incomplete without taking a detour to knock on stranger’s doors. As a northerner, I was taken aback when Tom first told us we’d be arriving unannounced to random people’s farms asking to see the cemeteries on their properties. Sometimes we’re met with people entirely weirded out by our request, while other times it leads to a jackpot of insight into Virginia’s history.

Pictured is a field of the Blackwell family farm. Below the lone tree on the hill is a cemetery of fewer than a dozen identifiable burials. This unannounced visit introduced us to an elderly woman and her husband, the former of which turned out to be a dedicated genealogist with a detailed record of the Blackwell family and their relatives. She didn’t invite us in, but I did manage to get a glimpse of her home office where she conducted and stored her family tree research by asking to use their bathroom. Again, the northerner in me felt like I was intruding but it turned out to be an effective way of getting a deeper insight into the woman’s hobby. Mrs. Blackwell gladly let us go examine the cemetery and, thankfully, no cows swarmed us this time. We identified more burials than were marked and were left with more questions than we had upon arrival. One unmarked grave, for example, we learned is actually an old family pet’s burial site. Two headstones with porcelain faces were defaced we found out because of past relatives attempts at hiding certain aspects of the family’s history.

Not everyone is as welcoming and enthusiastic about us looking at their sites though. Tom has made the decision to not use a state issued sticker on the truck to inform people a state employee has arrived because of the widespread distrust of the government in southwestern Virginia. In fact, Tom often introduces himself as merely Tom and doesn’t even acknowledge he’s a state archaeologist. The tension creates more challenges for me as an intern, having to explain I’m a college student using their site as a learning opportunity.

With a  state as rich in history as Virginia, it’s not surprising there is a state agency entirely dedicated to the preservation of the state’s history. Preservation, however, doesn’t necessarily mean protecting a site from destruction. It may mean collecting artifacts, taking photos, and writing up a report of the site data before sending it off to Richmond for storage while the site gets destroyed for development. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources has four archaeologists responsible for the entire state of Virginia. The Western Preservation Office, where I intern, has a massive jurisdiction – as the map indicates. My supervisor, Tom Klatka, has to drive hours some days just to see a site or potential site.

With our backpacks packed with snacks, water, a notebook, and pencil and dressed in worn clothing that will most likely be discolored to a brownish tint by the end of the day, we climb into the office truck equipped with even more various tools of the trade. Tom’s backpack will have even more than ours, never leaving without the GPS, compass, flag markers, and a tape measure. Though we’ll most likely never touch the tape measure, as we had to learn to measure with our walking pace. Ten of my own steps, for example, is equivalent to 25 feet. So if I’m surveying a site we found and count 40 steps, I know the length of the site is 100 feet. Sometimes we’ll drive 45 minutes away, other days it’s over two hours heading deeper and deeper into rural Virginia. Moreover, many days are in the lab cleaning artifacts with a toothbrush and tray of water, sorting them into labeled bags, and packing them into acid free boxes.

Whether I’m determining soil colors, cleaning off lithic and bone artifacts, or perusing through a historical society museum in a country I’ve never even heard of, the responsibilities of the staff at the DHR Western Preservation Office are both interesting and chalk full of opportunities to learn new things. When you’re responsible for the archaeological work of a third of the state of Virginia, no two days are alike. An archaeologist’s job, I’ve experienced firsthand, involves more than just digging for arrowheads. It requires vast working knowledge of Virginia and the willingness to constantly expand your knowledge.

The 18th annual Ghost Walk came and went, and I could not have enjoyed it more. As I mentioned in my last post, I was slated to portray Charlie Hammit, Salem’s very own silent film star. After donning my western garb (complete with cowboy hat and fake “copperhead” snake around my neck), I set up shop in East Hill cemetery and awaited the first tour group. Taking a bit of artistic license with my character, I decided to portray Mr. Hammit as a true product of the theatre, over-dramatizing my lines and injecting a lot of energy, and a bit of self aggrandizement, into the character. From what I gathered, the audience enjoyed the burst of energy near the end of the tour and I was, apparently, quite popular with the middle school girls throughout the weekend…so big ego boost for me.

 

Now that both Ghost Walks have concluded, including the one at Sherwood that followed East Hill’s, my internship has shifted gears a bit. With most of the public history events in the rear view mirror, I’ve begun to do more historical research for various exhibits and lectures. Next, I will get to design my own exhibit, which I plan on featuring the political dynamics behind Salem’s midnight transition from a town to a city.

 

The last month of my internship has been more of the same. I have continued to go between the collections in Center in the Square and the O. Winston Link museum, adding items and collections to PastPerfect in both locations. I have made a few discoveries, one of which being, I despise scrapbooks. I had scan and deconstruct three old scrapbooks from a local sorority and it was a tedious and stressful job. One of the scrapbooks had metallic pages which caused some of the old newspaper articles to rip and be discarded. I learned that this is exactly why scrapbooks are scanned first, so that anything destroyed in the deconstruction can be viewed online.

The most exciting job I’ve had in the past month was accessioning a collection of old books from the Watts collection. I had a true history geek moment when I looked at the dates of publication: the newest was published in 1922 and the oldest were a four volume set of poems published in 1778. I had the honor of handling books published just two years after our nation was born and the weight of it was not lost on me. While I still had the tedious job of entering the books into the PastPerfect system, I had a better appreciation for the content I was entering. The books were in pretty great shape for their age and it isn’t every day that you get to hold four books that are 239 years old.              

Since my last post I have had three separate things I have spent time working on.

One of these was working with my supervisor in the researching of images and rejigging the designs for signs/placards within the Aviation Gallery.  I learned that images need to be of a certain size so that when they are blown up for signs that they do not become fuzzy or otherwise compromised.  Images also have to be within Public Domain or Creative Commons so the copyright is not infringed upon or causing delays in the creation of exhibits.  She walked me through the procedure of using Word Publisher to create sign designs for the museum exhibits.

 Above are pictures of some mock-up placards that my supervisor had done.  She likes to take out these mock-ups out to the gallery and see how they look in place.  This can bring to mind any aesthetic or functional changes that might need to be made.

In addition to this project, I’ve continued with accessioning various things within our collection that need to go into our PastPerfect program.

Seeing as today is Halloween, we had our Halloween event back on Saturday.  The signs that I put up before my last post were for this event.  We were encouraged to wear costumes as were our visitors.  I came in and ran a children’s area featuring a craft’s table, temporary tattoos, and handling the free posters that were rewards for our scavenger hunt.  It was a lot of fun for me.  I came to the museum dressed as Velma Dinkley from Scooby-Doo and the kids thought that was pretty fun which is the picture on the right at the bottom.  The left picture below is of the tattoo table with some kids playing with a pet snake of one of our volunteers who was dressed as Beetlejuice.