MIAC News:
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded $105,000 to the Museum of New Mexico Foundation on behalf of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, to benefit the Museum’s archaeological collections.
The museum will use these grant funds to improve access to key artifacts that are part of the founding collections of the Laboratory of Anthropology (LOA), allowing the Museum to move the H.P. Mera Ceramic Survey Collection to the new repository at the Center for New Mexico Archaeology (CNMA), along with the other comparative and archaeological type collections.
The project will use the process of inventorying and packing the collections for transport as an opportunity to capture digital images of selected materials and confirm information in the LOA catalog records.
The comparative collections include an estimated 50,000 artifacts and samples, and are made up of historically important ceramic survey and type sherd collections, geologic and turquoise specimens, petrographic slides of ceramics, examples of Euro-American historic artifacts, and representative specimens of bone and lithic tools, ceramics, and basketry fragments used in educational programming by the Museum staff.
These collections are the archaeological artifacts most frequently used by researchers, with more than 100 visitors and researchers taking advantage of them on site at the Laboratory last year. Digital photos of the Mera Survey Collections, made available on-line through the Museum’s web site, will provide many more individuals with an opportunity to examine and study these significant artifacts without having to visit Santa Fe.
“Having easier access to the collections will be a blessing both for the staff and for the researchers. This will give us room for more researchers at one time and allow us a chance to accommodate the advanced technologies required by 21st century scientists,” Dody Fugate, the assistant curator of Archaeological Research Collections at the Museum, said of the grant award said.
The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture is New Mexico’s primary repository for archaeological materials from State lands, and provides curatorial services to various land-managing federal agencies and several of New Mexico’s Native American tribes.
These priceless and irreplaceable collections represent a sizeable segment of the area’s cultural heritage, and constitute a primary resource for archaeological research in the Southwest. They are actively used for research, education, and exhibition purposes by contract archaeologists, students, scholars, museum curators, Native Americans researching their tribal history, and educators.
This project is one phase of a much larger project to survey, rehouse, and relocate all of the archaeological collections to a new, centralized, state of the art storage and research facility in the CNMA.
“Our grants are highly competitive. The Institute of Museum and Library Services enlists hundreds of library and museum professionals throughout the United States to review grant applications and make recommendations on projects most worthy of funding,” IMLS Director Susan H. Hildreth said. “Receiving a grant from IMLS is significant achievement, and we congratulate Museum of New Mexico Foundation for being among the 2014 IMLS museum grantees.”
This year the IMLS Museums for America program received 554 applications requesting $56,247,161. Of these, 196 projects, about 35 percent of the applicants, were selected to receive funding totaling $20,405,211.
IMLS museum grants support a wide variety of projects that create learning experiences, strengthen community communities, care for collections, and provide broad public access.
