The May speaker was 

Marybeth Tomka 

Argyle Archaeological Services

presenting  

Nationwide Collections Locator Project: Did we flop at the SAAs?

The talk deals with a project stemming from Marybeth's involvement with the Society for American Archaeology's Airlie House 2.0 (AH2.0) Task Force and the Archaeological Collections and Repositories Community of Practice (ARC-CoP) initiatives to locate and publish information on archaeological collections for the benefits of researchers and descendant communities.

Marybeth Ford Tomka arrived in Texas from New York in August of 1977 to study Archaeology at UT Austin after trading letters with E Mott Davis while still in high school. She turned down a work study job at TARL her freshman year thinking she knew nothing yet and didn’t want to embarrass herself.  We will never know if this was a mistake.

She got to TARL finally in the Spring of 1979 as Jim Neely’s work study student to work on the WS Ranch Site project from where she progressed into grad school as his student and as Carolyn Spock’s work study in records for three years.   But first she attended the NAN Ranch field school in New Mexico with Harry Shafer and the Texas Aggies. 

During her first semester she took a lithic technology class with Jerry Epstein and met her husband and sealed her fate to remain in Texas.  They have raised two adult children and only lived along the I-35 corridor. 

Marybeth got her master’s degree with a thesis on the great kiva at the WS Ranch Site, worked for TPWD for 6 years, did a 6.5 year period working for Mariah which became TRC Mariah, and then went off to UTSA-CAR where she worked for 14 years as the lab director and curator.  In 2014 she returned home to TARL as the Head of Collections where she stayed until her retirement in 2022. 

She has been active in TAS and CTA for 45 years serving on multiple committees and as TAS treasurer for 11 years.  Marybeth has recently moved onto the national stage with the SAA’s Airlie House Task force and is working with a national group of collections professionals to highlight the need for better collections care from the field to the repository.  And in the spring of 2023 after retiring she formed  Argyle Archaeological Services LLC to do a variety of curatorial consulting which has also included a repatriation project, a few subcontracting analysis and reporting projects, and hopes to expand Argyle now that Steve has also retired and can add his lithic and ceramic expertise on a full time basis to the Argyle service line.

Photos provided by Marybeth Tomka, "Both pictures are from 1981.  One is from New Mexico during my field school with Harry Shafer at NAN Ranch and the other is at  41WH39, The Crestmont Site (or what we called the Wharton site before it had a name).  It was my first field experience and it was a salvage operation that started in January 1981 when a Ditch Witch digging a telephone line in a housing development hit skeletal material. The grad students at TARL knew I was itching to get experience and had just taken osteology so they took me along to check out the site and meet Paddy Patterson from THC there the next morning -- Saturday.  At the crack of dawn, Jeff Girard, Rick Watson, and I headed off to Wharton, Texas.  My God what an experience.  This picture is from summer work when I got back from field school."

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