3,000 artifacts in one day - well, almost.

Twenty-four volunteers helped curate 1,900 artifacts.

Saturday was an exciting day at the Desert Museum, exciting for museum curators anyway. The museum held a 14-hour, 3,000 Artifacts in a Day event. Twenty four volunteers made good headway toward the ambitious goal, contributing over a hundred hours combined.  People actually started working around 9:00am and came throughout the day. Even at the end of the day, a group of IVC students arrived at 8:00pm and worked through the night.  

“Normally our volunteers complete 600 artifacts in a week, so trying to re-curate 3,000 in one day was a pretty large goal.” admitted Jessica Brody, a curator at the museum. In the end about 1,900 artifacts were moved from temporary storage into permanent storage. The re-curation of the of the IVC archaeological collection has been the main work of the museum this year.

IVC students curated through the night.

 “I had to put in my time to help the museum,” said Eusebio Arballo, an El Centro resident.  “I intended to volunteer from 10am – 2pm, but I saw a sign on the wall saying that one person had curated 161 artifacts.” Trying to beat that number, Eusebio worked well into the evening establishing a new personal best at the museum with 181 artifacts re-curated.

Some of the archaeologists who originally collected the artifacts were on hand to talk about the significance of the collections and their experience in the field. Volunteers were also invited on tours of the collection rooms, where they received a behind the scenes look at the process of starting a new museum.

At the very end of the evening, the museum screened the movie “Somewhere Between” as part of the Sundance Film Forward program.