Connecting Archives and Artifacts: Year Two of the Ralph S. and Rose L. Solecki Papers and Artifacts Project

Year two of the Ralph S. and Rose L. Solecki Papers and Artifacts Project is underway! In the upcoming weeks, you’ll hear from three Solecki Project interns about how the Solecki Project Team integrated artifacts into storage, a Neanderthal murder mystery, and the fascinating Proto-Neolithic site of Zawi Chemi Shanidar.

While the first year of the Solecki project focused on processing the archival materials of paleoarchaeologists Ralph and Rose Solecki including field notes, maps, photographs, and correspondence, this year the project is devoted to cataloging artifacts unearthed during the Soleckis' excavations at sites throughout the Near East, most notably at the site of Shanidar Cave and Zawi Chemi Shanidar in northern Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as artifacts from their teaching collections.

Ralph and Rose Solecki analyzing artifacts at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, 1966. [1]

As archaeologists, Ralph and Rose Solecki meticulously documented the sites at which they excavated. This documentation included detailed maps of their excavations with the exact locations of artifacts, faunal (or animal) remains, charcoal and soil samples, and other finds like Neanderthal remains in situ, or in its original position in the ground; field data cards with drawings or photographs of each artifact; data sheets containing analysis of artifacts to determine the methods in which they were created and utilized by ancient peoples; and countless other mediums of recording their archaeological work.  All of this documentation created by the Soleckis can be found within their archival collection and is crucial for fully understanding the artifacts during the cataloging process.

Notched Steep Side Scraper (A607238-0) and an illustration from Season IV excavations of the Zawi Chemi Shanidar site, 1960. [1&2]

Now that the wealth of information within the Soleckis’ archival collections has been realized through the first year of the project, the goal of the second year is to catalog the artifacts and connect the information in the archival collection to the catalog records for each artifact within the NMNH Department of Anthropology’s collections database. By consulting the documentation, the catalog records will include exact locations from which the artifacts were uncovered, the temporal and cultural affiliation of the artifact such as Mousterian (the time period associated with Neanderthals) or Protoneolithic (the era just before the emergence of agriculture), and the type of tool or purpose of the artifact as evaluated by Ralph and Rose Solecki. All of this information from the archives provides context to the artifacts that could otherwise be lost and make future research of the material much more difficult if not impossible. By connecting the archives to the artifacts and vice versa, both collections become more accessible to anyone who might be interested in the Soleckis’ seminal archaeological work.

Catalogued artifacts from Season III excavations (1956-1957) of the Shanidar Cave site [2]

Revisiting the Soleckis’ archives and the original finds is a vital part of new investigations at Shanidar Cave, which have been ongoing since 2014 and which are led by Professor Graeme Barker from the University of Cambridge, UK [3]. Shanidar Cave is one of the most important Neanderthal sites ever discovered, and modern archaeological techniques that were unavailable at the time when Ralph Solecki was excavating have enormous potential to deepen our knowledge of when Neanderthals and modern humans used the cave, what they ate, the tools they used, and how they lived. Dr. Sacha Jones (University of Cambridge) has already re-analyzed the stone tools recovered during Ralph Solecki’s excavations to better understand Neanderthal and modern human technologies at Shanidar. Unpublished archive photos from Ralph Solecki’s excavations also proved invaluable for identifying and understanding exciting new Neanderthal remains discovered during the more recent excavations [4]. The archival material provides an essential foundation on which to build current and future research, and to which researchers return with new questions, methods and perspectives to gain a more complete picture of the lives of our ancestors.

As the second year of the Ralph S. and Rose L. Solecki Papers and Artifacts Project continues, look out for more highlights from both the archival and artifact collections of Ralph and Rose Solecki!

Next week, Tiffany Priest will discuss how we integrated the artifact collections of Ralph and Rose Solecki into storage at the Smithsonian’s Museum Support Center. Then, Matthew Capece will tell us about the mystery surrounding the death of the Shanidar III Neanderthal. Finally, Sophia Carroll will highlight Rose Solecki’s work at the Proto-Neolithic site of Zawi Chemi Shanidar.

Thank you to Drs. Ralph, Rose, John, and William Solecki; Dr. Melinda Zeder, curator emeritus in the NMNH Department of Anthropology; the staff of the National Anthropological Archives and the NMNH Department of Anthropology; the Solecki Project volunteers, Michelle Fuentes, Kennis Pieper, and Taylor Reynolds; the Fall 2018 interns, Matthew Capece, Sophia Carroll, and Tiffany Priest; Winter Break Intern Moni Islam; and Spring 2019 interns Viridiana Garcia and Kayla Kubehl for their diligent work and overall support of the Ralph S. and Rose L. Solecki Papers and Artifacts Project. Thank you to Dr. Emma Pomeroy of the University of Cambridge for contributing updates on the current archaeological work at Shanidar Cave. The Ralph S. and Rose L. Solecki Papers and Artifacts Project was made possible by two grants from the Smithsonian Institution’s Collections Care and Preservation Fund.

Molly Kamph, Project Archivist and Archaeological Collections Technician
Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History


Sources
[1] The Ralph and Rose Solecki Papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
[2] Accession 220078, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution.
[3] Tim Reynolds, William Boismier, Lucy Farr, Chris Hunt, Dlshad Abdulmutalb and Graeme Barker, 2015. “New investigations at Shanidar Cave, Iraqi Kurdistan.” Antiquity: A Review of World Archaeology vol. 89, no. 348.
[4] Elizabeth Culotta, 2019. “New remains discovered at site of famous Neanderthal ‘flower burial’” Science, doi:10.1126/science.aaw7586