Treasures of Clay - page 3

Intern Jennifer Evers, left, and administrative assistant Sonya Issaeva work on katsina figurines.

“This is so dramatic for us,” Odegaard says. “I used to have just one cramped space.”

Every last one of the 20,000 pots has now moved into a brand-new, 3200-square-foot up-to-the-minute vault. [1] Carved into existing space on the first floor of the south museum building, the secure vault has precisely calibrated temperature and humidity controls. Acres of storage shelves, dusted with powder, give every pot the chance to stand on its own, no stacking allowed, and the lighting is soft and protective.

“It’s just for the Southwest pottery,” Odegaard gleefully notes, before rolling off every superlative in the conservator’s book: “It’s a wonderful, state-of-the-art climate-controlled, topnotch facility.”

The new lab is equipped with every gadget in the conservators’ tool bag. At the low-tech end is a sand table—kind of a sandbox on stilts—where workers glue shards  back into pots above a cushioning layer of sand. At the far reaches of high tech is a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscope, hooked up to a computer, which “allows us to learn the composition and molecular structure” of a pot fragment.

[1] All of the pots were not moved in the vault at the time the article was first published. All of the pots should be moved into the vault by Fall 2007.—Ed.