By Kimi Eisele

Caitlin O'Grady may have glimpsed her future as early as the second grade. While on a family trip to Mexico, she visited ruins of the Mayan culture. "I visited the archaeological sites and looked at the artifacts and thought, 'This is the coolest thing ever.'"

Her passion continued with subsequent family trips to archaeological sites in Europe, Asia, and Central and South America and eventually landed her an internship with the Arizona State Museum's Pottery Project, helping to preserve the Museum's collection of 20,000 Southwest Indian whole-vessel ceramics, the largest such collection in the world. Now O'Grady is one of the first doctoral candidates in a new University program that trains students to analyze, identify, and decipher the materials of ancient artifacts in an effort to secure their preservation.

The new Heritage Conservation Science Program, housed in the Materials Science and Engineering Department, was spearheaded by Nancy Odegaard, professor of anthropology and conservator at the Arizona State Museum, and Pamela Vandiver, a professor in the department of materials science and engineering with a joint appointment in anthropology.

Joseph Simmons, head of the materials science and engineering department, who worked with both Odegaard and Vandiver to launch the new program, says, "What this program aims to do is graduate a new kind of person, with a degree in materials science and engineering with a focused attention on cultural materials, artifact preservation, art and archaeology."

While conservators and curators must have a working knowledge of the materials they study, Simmons said, a deeper background in materials science greatly increases their understanding and ability to work with ancient artifacts and technologies, Simmons said. "It's well known that ancient artifacts all over the world are degrading. The knowledge of how materials fracture, weather, and corrode would be very useful to helping to preserve these treasures."

Inherently interdisciplinary, the field of heritage conservation science combines the science of chemistry, geology, biology, and materials with social sciences such as archaeology, anthropology, and even history and art history.

The new program draws on the strength of existing research at the University from the Museum collection and its lab, the only museum conservation lab in Arizona, to the anthropology and materials science and engineering departments. "We're building on a long established tradition of interdisciplinary studies in science and anthropology, archaeology, and art history," Vandiver said.

In fact, the Museum and the materials science and engineering department (once part of the school of mines) were original departments in Old Main at the University's inception, Odegaard said.

Working with ancient materials such as ceramics and textiles requires a strong understanding of both materials science and cultural contexts, Odegaard said. Her work as a conservator at the Arizona State Museum illustrates this. Working to preserve items in the existing Museum collection ­ paintings, textiles, paper works, and ceramics ­ requires studying the pigments and fibers of materials in order to understand the technology used to create the artifacts as well the chemical and biological changes that can help arrest their deterioration.

Recent work involving the study of toxic residues on materials reveals how anthropology can compliment a scientific understanding of artifacts. (See Report on Research, Volume 18, No. 2, Summer 2002) Taxidermal specimens and moth-eaten blankets in a museum's collection, for instance, may have at one time been "protected" with certain chemicals or pesticides such as arsenic or lead to preserve them. "It's a hot issue because some of the materials going back into tribes or back into cultural use may be unsafe," Odegaard said. "Tribes need to know, Can I use this? How dangerous is it?"

The Arizona State Museum has now taken an important step in undoing some of those practices, Odegaard said. Working with a chemist, a medical toxicologist, and a tribal consultant, Odegaard and her team are researching what the toxins might be, examining records, interviewing people, and testing ways to remove them. "Fortunately both new equipment and modern pest controls don't involve these chemicals," Odegaard said. "Now, we're trying to clean up the past."

As Odegaard's work illustrates, revisiting the past with modern tools and technology opens up new doors in research, Simmons said. "We can apply new, advanced tools to ancient materials and get better understanding of materials at atomic level and have a better chance for saving them."

Vandiver agreed. "Materials science offers a basic paradigm that can be applied to old materials and technology," she said. Formerly a senior research scientist in inorganic materials at the Smithsonian Institution, Vandiver brings extensive field experience to the program. As a UNESCO adviser, she has worked on excavations of ceramics and studied ancient kilns in Uzbekistan and Cambodia.

While a modern materials scientist has an ample amount of material to work with, the challenge in working with ancient artifacts is sample size, said Vandiver. "Our job is to preserve [ancient artifacts] as best we can. When you study an old material you can only take a very small sample and then cycle it through one technique after another in order to verify its microstructure and composition."

By measuring the properties of an ancient artifact, conservation scientists can understand how something was made and how it functioned or performed. "Often times we replicate ancient technological processes in order to understand how [things] were made and test to see how they were used."

People of the ancient world wanted particular properties in their objects and materials, she explained. For instance, materials had to be durable, useful, culturally significant, or have certain optical qualities. "We can test these properties now as long as they haven't weathered too much," Vandiver said. "The results of these studies may feed back into the culture as well as help us understand how these objects were made. The idea is if you keep traditions alive you preserve a part of ancient culture as living culture."

As a professor in the new program, Vandiver's goal now is "to try to help students understand how to characterize ancient materials and analyze and recognize ancient technologies in a way that will contribute to preservation of material culture in museums and collections."

Odegaard's and Vandiver's work illustrates the kinds of issues heritage conservation scientists work to understand. Their research offers practical learning opportunities for students in the new program.

"The opportunity to work with these two women as well as with other scholars is unparalleled," doctoral candidate O'Grady said.

For her dissertation research, O'Grady will continue work she has already done as an intern for the Pottery Project at the Museum. Following a condition survey of 1,066 ceramic artifacts from Casas Grandes, O'Grady will conduct materials research to determine correlations among manufacturing technology, burial conditions and their current state of preservation.

When she completes the program, O'Grady hopes for an academic position at a university "ideally with an attached museum that would enable me to teach and do research both in and out of the field."

Other options for students who complete the program include working at non-governmental organizations involved in heritage preservation as well as at museums and universities, Vandiver said.

"We expect that once it becomes known we are going to have some of the best students from around the country," Simmons said. "We could send graduates all over the world to save the world's artifacts."