Behind the Museum

During our department’s PhD reading group today, we were discussing the role of museums and the role of the curatorial staff within museums, and I got to thinking of some of the people I’d worked with when I worked for a large museum (which shall remain unnamed here).

The museum where I worked (when I was in Junior College) was one of the only museums in the US to perform soil analysis for the purpose of determining fossil content, and had a massive, comparative collection to support that analysis. My job was fairly mind-numbing and mostly involved washing dirt. Yes – washing dirt.

There were immense piles of dirt out in back of the museum, which had been collected from all over the place (sometimes to survey an area for road-building, sometimes illicitly and for the interest of the museum staff, but more on that later). We’d make up tags (aluminum cans, cut into squares, and written on with a ball-point pen to make an impression), go out to whichever pile of dirt was on the schedule for that day, and gather some dirt up into box-screens. These screens were of varying grades, but usually fairly fine mesh (think, window-screen, at the finest). We’d then take those screens over to our “workstations:” 50-gallon drums which had been cut in half lengthwise, resting on stands out in an orange grove. We’d fill the drum with water, and wash all of the silt out of the soil. The soil would then be set out in the sun to dry, we’d dump the silt into a ditch (which had to be mucked out periodically), and … wash the next set of screens.

If things had come out fairly cleanly, that was the end of the process: the screens would be looked over by a technician to find the teeth and bone fragments, then examined by a paleontologist.

Sometimes, if the screens had too many minerals in them (quartz and feldspar), I’d perform another step: I’d ladle the bits into a bucket of zinc-bromide acid. The quartz and feldspar would float to the top, and the fossils would sink to the bottom. At the end of the process, I might end up with 1 cup of fossils (and a few heavier minerals), and buckets of quartz and feldspar. All of this was then washed and dried yet again, to be looked over by the museum staff.

Another general task of all of we lackeys was to wash away flesh from rotting animals, which were generally stashed around beneath the orange trees, but had been kept upon the roof of the museum at one point; it was nice and sunny up there, after all, and good for rotting. It was also near the intake for the ventilation system, so was relocated after a wonderful explosion of a glass jar (rotting generates pressure, after all). Sometimes we’d boil the carcasses (a python, in one instance) to accelerate the rotting process.

The skeletons – fresh, shiny, and free of any abrasions because they’d been rotted away, rather than having the flesh removed by mechanical means – would then be added to the comparative collection.

So, behind the scenes at the museum, we had about a dozen teenagers, perhaps a few people performing community-service (it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to wash dirt, and it helps if you aren’t), and about 15 other people, none of whom was involved with the exhibits of the museum, or giving tours, or speaking to the general public.

It is these “other people” which are the whole point of the workings behind the museum. I would like to describe a few of them for you.

“Chico.” Chico had a special task, at the museum: he was in charge of the clay. You see, sometimes the soil would be comprised of clay, and this wouldn’t easily give up its fossils. So, he’d break up the clumps of clay with water, put the clumps into paint buckets, and then douse them in kerosene. He’d then go after the clay with his hands (no gloves for him – his arms up to his elbows had no pigment as a result). Chico spoke little English, and his wife made wonderful burritos, but that’s about all I know about the man. Terminally shy, he’d sometimes share his food with me, but generally avoided company. He just … worked with his arms in kerosene all day, every day.

Our Resident (literally) Paleontologist. This man was an absolute phenomenon. You could bring him a tooth or bone, and he’d tell you exactly which rodent had lost it, how old that rodent was (geologically), whether the specimen was unique enough to include in the collection, and whether it was a rare find. He worked full-time for two museums, performing this magic trick. He also lived in his Volkswagon van, which he parked in the museum lot during Winter, and around beneath the trees when it was warmer. I say “lived,” but this is quite misleading: he merely passed out there, if he made it there, because he really did live in the museum. I suspect that he lived in just the same way at his second job, as well.

Dr. Death. I don’t suppose that, when pursuing a Master’s Degree in Paleontology, this guy ever thought he’d end up as he did: he was in charge of acquisitions of new specimens, and directed the process of “rotting off.” This meant that his weekends were consumed by loading his own ammunition with just enough gunpowder and bird-shot to stun an animal (lizards were his specialty) without breaking any bones. He’d then gas the animal to death and bring it back to the museum. If he needed to acquire a specimen from a state park, or from somewhere which didn’t necessarily want him shooting things, he’d go out with a slingshot. He worked full-time during the week, but these acquisitions were what really made him happy.

The Director. This man had a thing for dirt. Fossils in general were interesting, of course, but he loved the hunt for small fossils, and would go to great lengths to acquire new ones. Most of the time this involved driving hundreds of miles to collect dirt in the bed of his pickup truck, but sometimes this meant begging for access to somebody’s private property. And if they didn’t listen to his begging? Well, sometimes he’d drive out in the middle of the night, with a shovel and some buckets, and simply take what he thought might prove interesting.

The Director was truly one for acquisition, and couldn’t turn down a body: he once got hold of a dead camel. The problem with this corpse was, of course, that it was huge, and that carrion beetles need their food to be dried out (they live in the desert, after all). So, The Director carted his camel off to the desert somewhere and buried him, where he remained, checked on routinely (against thieves! Because there are grave robbers out to rob honest men), for five years. By the time the camel was suitably dessicated, the museum’s collection of carrion beetles had died due to a fungus (somebody hadn’t properly freeze-dried their food). The dessicated camel remained buried in the sands, awaiting the arrival of a new colony of beetles.

As to the rest, well, I never really had to meet them: they mostly huddled over piles of pebbles, picking out the teeth and bones, I think. I didn’t really make it into the back of the museum – at least, not to the inside of the back of the museum. That was for the privileged few.

To be honest, though, if the characters known to me are any representation, I think that the people inside the hidden sanctum of the museum were probably not “people persons.” I can’t imagine them having anything to say to the general public, much less explaining why mouse-teeth were interesting or important. They never made it into the exhibits of the museum, and would probably have been confused had they done so. They were simply interested in the collection, and worked to further its own, mysterious ends.

These recollections came to mind because we were pondering the divide between the inner sanctum of museums, collections, archives, and libraries. All four tend to exclude the general public to some degree, despite presenting some sort of a public face – a place where children can come to explore, or where hobbyists can learn about their relatives, or what have you. This public face is a sort of sideshow to what these researchers regard to be the main event: the things which are central to their real work.

We were wondering about this divide, and about the pressures upon museums, collections, archives, and libraries: funding pressures, publication pressures, pressure to digitize their materials, and pressure to grant access to their materials (while perhaps not having enough space to house them). Add to that list that they must provide some sort of info-tainment, and a cafe, and you can see that there’s a bit of a crisis in these communities. How will they survive, and in what form? What role should they serve, and what role do they play in the larger community?

-D