Campus Community
Posted: Thursday, June 17, 2010Focus on College and Community Partnerships: Lisa Marie Anselmi
By Mary A. Durlak
Even after four months of sorting the McClurg Museum’s collection of stone tools, Buffalo State anthropologystudents are awed by the experience of touching ancient North American history.
“The Clovis points were used by people who were hunting woolly mammoths,” said Joshua Mauro. “They had to make these tools or die.”
Mauro is one of four students invited to take part in a special project under the guidance of Lisa Marie Anselmi, archaeologist and assistant professor of anthropology. Anselmi is an expert on technology among the native people of North America. The project involves the researching of 2,500 stone tools, a collection owned by the Chautauqua County Historical Society
Mauro, along with Jessica Stabell and Joe Dudek, is an anthropology major with a minor in indigenous studies. The fourth student, Lindsey Higgins, is a geography and planning major with a minor in anthropology who will pursue graduate studies in paleoclimatology at Ohio State University next year.
Clovis points are named after people whose culture flourished about 11,000 BCE across what is now the United States. These points are the oldest items in the collection; the newest date back to 1500 CE. Orry B. Heath amassed the collection, which includes about 2,500 artifacts; his wife donated it to the McClurg Museum, run by the Chautauqua County Historical Society, after his death.
“This collaboration is a win-win,” said Anselmi. “The McClurg Museum’s Heath collection will be professionally cataloged, and our students are getting invaluable experience.” So far, the students have cataloged fewer than 200 items. However, Anselmi pointed out that preliminary work was very time-consuming. “First we sorted out four boxfuls of lithics [stone tools]. Then we had to interpret Heath’s identification system, so that we can incorporate his information about each item, including where it was found.”
The students are examining each item, using existing reference material to identify the tool. Most are projectile points—arrowheads, spearheads, and points for darts. Others are scraping tools. “We know the Clovis points were used in hunting mastodons and woolly mammoths because they’ve been found at kill sites with the animals’ bones,” explained Higgins.
All four students agree that handling such ancient human tools is a profound experience. Each has attempted “flint knapping,” the technique of using one stone to tap flakes off another stone to create a tool. “It’s incredibly difficult,” said Dudek. “You realize quickly that these people were very skilled.”
Thanks to a minigrant from the College and Community Partnerships Office, the project will move into a second phase in fall 2010. With the acquisition of a digital camera, Anselmi and her students will create an online, searchable database containing photos of each artifact. “We’re very grateful for the minigrant,” said Anselmi. “The contribution to North American archaeology is very important.”
------------------------------------------------------------------
Read previous Focus on College and Community Partnerships stories:
