WS Ranch Archaeological Project

The WS Ranch Archaeological Project (WSRAP) Collection is an important and irreplaceable assemblage of approximately 500,000 artifacts of Late Pithouse, Classic Mimbres, and Tularosa Phase material cultures. Excavated decades ago near Alma, west central New Mexico, by the University of Texas at Austin, the unprocessed, uncataloged collection has never been fully accessible to researchers and tribal representatives. The collection was moved from substandard collections storage conditions in Texas to Denver after it was acquired by the Museum. National Endowment for the Humanities funds enabled project staff, volunteers, and interns to sustainably preserve and install the collection in the Museum’s state-of-the-art collections facility. Dissemination strategies will make the collection accessible to professionals and a variety of museum audiences, including tribes.

The WS Ranch collection move was an effort four years in the making. Preliminary inventories were made in 2017 and 2019, with an estimated 890 boxes and 80 loose groundstone. The move was originally scheduled for 2020 but was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, the 45 ancestors and 30 associated funerary objects were successfully repatriated and reburied in July 2021 in a joint ceremony with the US Forest Service and representatives from the Acoma and Zuni. Tentative plans were made to move the collection in fall 2021.

When the Museum received the National Endowment for the Humanities grant in August 2021 to process and rehouse the WS Ranch collection, plans were finalized to move the collection from Austin to Denver in September. The collection was stored at the University of Texas-Austin in two warehouses at the Texas Archaeological Research Center. Most of the collection was still housed in the original, brown-paper excavation bags and cardboard boxes, which had suffered from deterioration over time. The lack of environmental control in the two buildings where the collection was stored meant that pests, dust, dirt, light, and other pollutants had landed on the artifacts for decades.

In September 2021, a team of four collections staff from the Museum traveled to Austin for two weeks to pack the collection, with packing supplies shipped ahead of time the week before. Over the course of six days, working in the warehouse in temperatures as high as 90 degrees F, Museum staff prebuilt boxes, transferred bags and vials to the new boxes, labeled and weighed each box, staged the boxes in stacks, and then loaded them onto pallets. Custom boxes were built for large groundstone and whole ceramics. With a larger box size chosen for packing, the estimated 1000 boxes were condensed down to 560. The pallets were then loaded into a -20 degrees C freezer for two weeks to kill any potential pest infestations. Finally, the collection was loaded onto two dedicated trucks direct to Denver and arrived on October 11, 2021.

Half a million artifacts from the ancestral site of WS Ranch were acquired by the Museum. The artifacts have languished in Texas, in their original field packaging for 40 years. Our job was adopt, clean ‘em up, and make them organized and ready for research and interpretation.

After freezing and debugging, the next step was to deal with the original field packaging. This included torn and soiled brown paper bags, plastic vials, and plastic sandwich bags. These materials are not ideal for long term preservation and the next step is is to rehouse these objects in museum quality casing.  Each type of object, like pottery, stone tools, animal bones, shell artifacts or soil samples, have different storage needs. Pottery sherds can be stored in food grade plastic bags, but delicate pieces of shell need glass vials to protect them. Large objects like groundstone (manos and metates) need custom housing built called “mounts” that are tailored to fit like a glove.

After each object is rehoused, its information is recorded in our database for researchers and tribal members to access. All of this work took a huge team of volunteers and interns who diligently worked to rehouse, enter data, build mounts, problem solve, and care for this important and long neglected collection. 

This work is made possible in part by the grant PF-280964-21 from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections program.

The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this web resource are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the opinions or policies of the National Endowment for the Humanities.