Records and Archives

Project records from Cultural Resource Management (CRM) projects and contracted research done via Federal and State laws, are kept as a unit called an accession within the Project Archives.  These records date back to the second decade of the 20th century during the archeological survey work of J.E. Pearce. 

Map files include permanent copies of USGS 7.5' topographic maps on which site locations are plotted and project map archives. Map archives consist of large, flat-filing cabinet drawers of documents including field and finished site maps, plan maps, profile drawings, project area maps, aerial photographs, and rock art tracings.

TARL also houses general and site-specific photographs from thousands of archeological sites and projects that dramatically proves, in some cases, a picture is indeed worth a thousand words. Like the site and project records themselves, photographs are primary records that document a great many things and circumstances that no longer exist.  

The old standard photographic medium was black-and-white photography. Many different formats and film types were used to photograph archeological sites. The oldest and most fragile photographic materials at TARL are glass plate negatives stored in special housing and the nitrate negatives in cold storage. More modern, film-based, black-and-white photographs, color slides, and some color prints constitute the bulk of the print files housed in filing cabinets. Digital photographs are quickly becoming the majority of our holdings.  We require that images from digital photography be printed with captions to mimic the photograph envelope system, which is organized the same way the site records are (e.g., by county and site number). The Photographic Archives are accessible only to qualified researchers and students, but images are also provided to museums, publishers, and for other educational purposes. The reorganization of the project archives will ultimately result in all photographs stored with their accession files.  Until then, staff can assist researchers with locating images.  TARL staff are also slowly digitizing all our old print and slide photography to create an accessible archive.   

TARL's photographic archives also include a number of special collections donated by individual photographers including E. Mott Davis, Norman Flaigg, Alex Krieger, Wayne Neyland, Robert (Bob) Stiba, and Wally Williams. These provide unique records of personal site visits, otherwise undocumented sites and collections, and many of the field schools of the Texas Archeological Society. TARL accepts new photographic collections on a case-by-case basis — neatly labeled and organized photographs are much more useful than boxes full of jumbled, unlabeled photographs. In order to prepare a photograph for the archives it must be identified, labeled, catalogued, and placed in acid-free archival sleeves, which can be a costly and time-consuming process.

Request to Photograph Collections/Order Photograph Copies (download PDF)

TARL houses records from over 81,000 individual sites organized by county and trinomial. In order to safeguard site location, the site records at TARL are accessible only to archeological researchers. Basic site data are available to qualified researchers via the Texas Archeological Sites Atlas. The site records at TARL include the primary documents (usually called "site forms") upon which the Atlas data is based. The data from site investigations including field notes, photographic logs, drawings, analysis notes, radiocarbon data forms, and artifact inventories, among many others are considered the project archives and discussed elsewhere.

The Smithsonian Trinomial system allows each officially recorded archeological site to be referenced with a single three-part (state-county-site) alpha-numeric designation. For example, 41BX228; Texas being the 41st state at the time the system was devised, BX for Bexar County, Texas, and 228th as the next archeological site officially recorded in the county numerically. Many sites are also given names (e.g., the Panther Springs Creek site is 41BX228). Several cross-referenced files are maintained to keep track of site names and link older numbering systems and other designations to the trinomial designations.

Amongst TARL's project papers, are the archives of several individuals of import to Texas archeology and the University of Texas' Department of Anthropology.  These include James E. Pearce, the father of UT archeology, Alex Krieger, E. Mott Davis, Jeremiah Epstein, and many others. Some of these have been digitized while others are in process.  TARL also holds the watercolor archives from Forrest Kirkland and his wife, Lula, including the water colors themselves and their field notes and photographs.  The Texas Memorial Museum was an early and active participant in archeology and paleontology, and TARL has many of the archival collections and objects from these investigations.  One of the most important portions of these special collections is the administrative records from the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s New Deal programs.  UT Austin was a hub of the projects conducted across Texas.  TARL holds the majority of the projects with the exception of the far west Texas materials which are held at the Panhandle-Plains Museum in Canyon, Texas.