Berrenda Creek Collection

Collection Description

The Berrenda Creek Collection was generated by the 1976 June-July NMSU Summer Archaeology Field School which took place at the Berrenda Creek site in the Gila National Forest. Dr. Stanley Bussey was the faculty adviser and A.R. Gomolak was the student director.

In 1976, former UM Director Dr. Stanley D. Bussey ran an NMSU summer field school at the Berrenda Creek site. Berrenda Creek (LA 12992) is a relatively small Classic-Postclassic Mimbres site located on Berrenda Creek, a tributary of the Rio Grande (Cron 2021, 16 and Figure 1). Roughly half of the Berrenda Creek site was disturbed by looting. In 1976 National Science Foundation funded the NMSU field school to carry out controlled excavations on intact portions of the site. The Berrenda Creek site is located within the Gila National Forest which is administered by the Forest Service (Cron 2021, 21).

How were the collections generated and what happend to them?

Based on the records Craig was able to locate and review, it is not clear whether the 1976 Berrenda Creek site excavations were dug in arbitrary or natural levels.¹ Following fieldwork, the Berrenda Creek collections were taken to the University Museum.

At the time the UM was located in the Seed House and some collections were kept in other offsite buildings (Baker 1997, 11). In 1981, the UM moved to Kent Hall and some collections continued to be housed in offsite structures (Baker 1997, 17). Cron (2021, 2) notes that in 2019, Berrenda Creek Collections were located in the basement of Kent Hall as well as outside storage. Cron (2021, 2–3) writes:

“Materials seem to have been re-bagged in non-acidic plastic bags in the 1990s and partially again in the 2010s, although no written records for this attempt of curation-updating have been located.”

“…it was clear that the curation standards had failed the collection…”

Though property of the federal government and under the jurisdiction of the Forest Service, the Berrenda Creek Collection was accessioned as 80.17. On 2024-02-22, Craig and Gilbreath reviewed the paper records in KH 210 and found information on this accession in a a gray 3-ring binder labeled “Registration Records 1959 – 1982” (PHOTOGRAPH). Additional records found in the filing cabinet included photographs and slides of Mimbres vessels but little else (CHECK).

Berrenda Creek materials are not consistently organized by provenience; but are more often roughly organized by broad type (i.e. brown wares, corrugated wares, and painted wares); assignment of accession numbers “often” followed this pattern with “several hundred sherds under one accession number,” and the types were not always assigned logically or correctly (Cron 2021, 27). As a result, Cron (2021, 27) assigned “item numbers when separating rim, body, or other sherds” and “[r]im sherds or other specialized sherds were given individual item numbers under their given accession numbers, while body sherds of like type and like form were established under one item number for a given accession number.” Strategies of pottery inventory “varied greatly” with some objects often termed “special sherds” which were whole vessels or ones with high potential for reconstruction given individual unique accession numbers with other pottery fragments accessioned in bulk (Cron 2021, 30). In many cases objects were grouped by basic type and in other cases pottery was grouped by feature or provenience. Cron (2021, 53) described the rehousing process as “straightforward”. Every artifact with an object number under an accession number was given its own bag and label; old bags and tags were retained. It appears that in addition to accession numbers, and object numbers, Cron (Cron 2021, 53) also added item numbers under object numbers. Cron (2021, 27) noted that “methods of artifact organization from the 1976 excavation are not recommended today.”

References

Baker, Chris. 1997. “The New Mexico State University Museum: A History.” University Museum, NMSU.

Cron, Lindsey. 2021. “Reanalyzing the Berrenda Creek Legacy Collection.” Master’s thesis, United States – New Mexico. https://www.proquest.com/docview/2553832493/abstract/E2A15B5C7D874D87PQ/1.

Mayo, Jill Ellen. 1994. “Garfield Revisited: Further Research on a Mimbres Site in the Southern Rio Grande Valley.” PhD thesis, Las Vegas, NM.

Footnotes

1. It is worth noting that Bussey’s excavations at Garfield/Rio Vista were conducted in arbitrary levels (Mayo 1994, 22).