The SAU Research Station Has a Postcard!!!

Much to my surprise, I have come across a 1963 postcard of the Bruce Center--the former Student Union on the Southern Arkansas University campus (then it was Southern State College). The back of this image reads:

College Center

Southern State College

Magnolia, Arkansas

Completed in the fall of 1963. Glassed-in lower

level contains dining facilities; upper level - lounge,

game room, snack bar, bookstore and Post Office.

The new location of the SAU Research Station of the Arkansas Archeological Survey is the entire "lower level" of this building...the "glassed-in" area is the future home of the SAU Museum (we're currently planning...I'll post more on this later).

How many non-park archaeological facilities have their own postcards, eh?

At any rate...I'm almost packed & the "big move" to Magnolia is this weekend!!!!!!

The End of An Era...

Below you see 9 years of my life on a table--the Van Winkle's Mill Archeological Project collection. I started this project in October of 1997 with Jerry Hilliard & James Davidson, and I "finished" it (barring new plans by Arkansas State Parks) with Alicia Valentino in October of 2005.


Today I prepared all 81 boxes of it for final curation and hauled into the curation facility at the Coordinating Office of the Arkansas Archeological Survey in Fayetteville.

That's alright...I've been ready for some new research projects for a long time now... Goodbye Northwest Arkansas, southwestern Arkansas here I come!

Packing, Websites, etc....

Well...I'm currently back in Northwest Arkansas--packing books, tying up loose ends on my NWA projects (i.e., getting Van Winkle's Mill into the curation facility) and assorted other things related to the Magnolia move.

Another thing I've been working on are a set of web pages for the SAU Research Station--currently only the SAU and UAM station do not have some sort of web presence...well, I'll fix that!

You can check out the design as it progresses....eventually it will live on the AAS station pages or on the SAU server, but for now the pages are a part of our collaborative Project Past site...check them out & send any design/content comments you have to me.

http://www.projectpast.org/sau/

A Week at SAU...

I'm just back from spending most of the week at the SAU Research Station...I really enjoyed the time with Frank Schambach...I learned a great deal about the history of the station and the AAS. As background information, I read the 1968 and 1969 weekly reports that Frank filed with with the Coordinating Office of the AAS...They read like a Beat novel....he was running from project to project non-stop....spending a part of the day profiling looter excavations over hear, photographing collections over there and picking up skeletons for analysis over yonder....The Beats were on amphetamines....I wonder how Frank did it?

I also talked quite a bit with David Jean (my Station Assistant) about future plans for the SAU Museum...it looks to be quite a bit of work. At any rate, I've posted a bunch of new photos of the SAU Research Station on my Flickr Stream...It's rough around the edges, but I hope to make it livable ASAP...I understand from David that it has already come a long way...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcbrandon/sets/72057594131005255/