catalogueprojectile points as visitors to Wichita’s
Exploration Place watch — including a group of
youngsters from St. Mary’s Preschool in Derby, Kan.
Amber Hardin and Jerry Elmore spent a good number of hours this spring semester on display, as it were.
As the WSU anthropology students worked to catalogue each of the thousands of projectile points comprising the Stauffer-Calkins Collection, they could be seen measuring, sketching, photographing and otherwise recording the arrowheads in full view of visitors to the glass-enclosed workroom dubbed Restoration Station at Wichita’s Exploration Place.
Both Hardin, who’s studying anthropology and English lit, and Elmore, an anthropology major with a chemistry minor, say they enjoyed being the center of attention. And judging by the rapt looks on the faces of the youngsters from St. Mary’s Preschool in Derby, Kan., Restoration Station visitors certainly enjoyed watching them at work.
One of Wichita State’s department of anthropology experts overseeing the students’ detail-oriented work was David Hughes, an associate professor who’s taught at WSU for some 17 years now and whose specialties include contract archaeology, ethnography, ethnohistory and Native American culture and adaptation.
Hughes explains that the documentation process Hardin and Elmore were helping carry out is a stringent one, leaving few aspects of the Native American projectile points unchecked or unrecorded. As Hughes points out, “We’ve set a standard no one else in the country is doing yet.”
When the process is complete, each arrowhead in the collection will have its own accompanying photo and fact sheet that lists specific attributes of the point’s blade, shoulder, notch, haft and base — attributes that include such precise information as type of “blunting,” “flaking pattern,” “lateral haft grinding,” “basal thinning” and “notch shape.”
This minute attention to detail, Hughes says, is key to reaching a better understanding of the people who made the artifacts, their culture and the pathways and timelines of their cultural change.
Amber Hardin, above, and Jerry Elmore, at left, catalogue projectile points as visitors to Wichita’s Exploration Place watch — including a group of youngsters from St. Mary’s Preschool in Derby, Kan.
Hughes, who holds a master’s degree from the University of Arkansas and a doctorate from the University of Oklahoma, came to an interest in anthropology and archaeology early in life.
He was 5 years old when he first accompanied his father, who taught geology and anthropology at West Texas University, on a dig in the Texas Panhandle — and he hasn’t stopped digging since.
By sharing his intrigue with all things anthropological, especially his fascination with the relationship between people and the land, Hughes, like his father before him, is helping guide a new generation of students to the intellectual delights of discovery.
