Looking over the last year we realized that we had 84 volunteers work with us and we didn’t get back to face-to-face until June 2021! Our volunteers in the lab and field are priceless – the main project going on in the lab is the curation processing of the materials from the Gault Archaeological Site. That’s 2.6 million artifacts, 60,000+ photos and over 100,000 pages of data. In short, it is a massive job! Our volunteers come in every type from student to retiree and help our curator, Jennifer Gandy, from tearing here hair out in worry. Over the years we have had more than 4,000 volunteers work with the Gault School and in 2016 the Obama White House recognized those volunteers with a Preserve America Stewards Award.
We also were lucky enough to get the Carl Yahnig Little River Collection – approximately 200,000 artifacts from six Kentucky sites with 5 of them being single component Clovis sites. While we are assisting in getting this ready for curation we are not analyzing this material and are hoping to get students and researchers interested in pursuing analysis. We recently presented information about this collection at 87th Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archaeology. We hope our presentation (see below) will help some student or researcher complete a research project or serve as comparative material for a larger study. The Gault materials have already seen 16 Masters theses and 7 Doctoral dissertations and Carl Yahnig’s materials will be available for this at the UT Texas Archeological Research Laboratory.
We are just getting ready to host our 11th Gault Volunteer Day on Saturday, May 7th. What started out as some of our members and alumni helping us with the maintenance of the Gault Site has now turned into a half day of hard work clearing up all the big jobs followed by an enormous amount of Texas BBQ. Past volunteer days have had as many as 60 people and we look forward to seeing all our friends again. More information on Volunteer Day and how to register (we need to know how many to feed) can be found on our website’s events calendar here: https://www.gaultschool.org/news/event/gault-volun...