SAA

VOLUNTEER PROFILE
volunteer profile
Sarah Herr
Volunteering has been a big and rewarding part of my life
as an archaeologist. My first volunteer experience was
with the National Park Service Volunteer-in-the-Parks
program after my freshman year of college. Robert (Bob) Powers,
the director of the Bandelier Archaeological Survey,* offered
me the opportunity based on my high school field school at
Crow Canyon experience and references from two families I’d
babysat for (happily, one of those was Tim Kohler’s family). I
was one of three volunteers and we were each assigned to a survey
crew. From May through August we helicoptered or packed
into the backcountry and set up a comfortable camp. For ten
hours a day, for seven eight-day sessions we walked the spectacular,
rugged canyon and mesa landscape of the park. At the
summer’s end, we spent a week recording the big tourist-drawing
front country sites and began our transition back to life with
the rest of humanity (who, at that time, all seemed to wear florescent
pink, adding to the shock of reentry). We recorded sprawling
Archaic flaked stone scatters, the fourteenth century communities
of small village farmers and their dry-farming fields, and
early twentieth century shepherds’ camps with wood stoves
stuffed into tuff caves. I learned, eventually, the ceramics of the
Northern Rio Grande, basic flaked stone analysis, and mapping,
and my proudest accomplishment was reading low level aerial
photographs as we mapped site boundaries tree by tree, or anthill
by anthill—the photos were that clear—in the days before GPS.
That was a life changing summer, and although I volunteered
again the next year, Bob offered me a job instead. I returned each
summer of college until the project ended.
In 1992, shortly after I entered graduate school at the University
of Arizona, I was offered the chance to become the student representative
to the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society
(AAHS) Board of Directors. My predecessor said “all they ever
do is talk about how to sell baseball hats.” But they did not talk
about hats (they must have resolved that under her term, thankfully).
I have worked with them ever since. Now, I primarily
serve as co-chair of the committee that oversees management of
the journal Kiva. This length of service is not uncommon
among AAHS’s professionals and avocational volunteers.
As I serve on more committees and run for positions on other
boards, including those working at the national level, I have
come to realize my local experience was good preparation.
Archaeological boards share similar concerns even as scale
varies: membership numbers, education and outreach, scholarships,
and publications. My recently ended term representing
cultural resource management professionals on the SAA Board
was an extraordinary opportunity to contribute to the national
conversation about how we do archaeology.
Each one of these positions opened new doors for me. If I didn’t
volunteer, I’d still have a wonderful job, but the places I’d have
worked would be fewer; my understanding of the history of the
southwest United States would be informed more by books
than by experience; and my understanding of the ways that people
practice archaeology around the state, country, and world
would be far narrower. Over the next three years, I will be paid
for some of my time and I will volunteer more with Christina
Rieth and Sjoerd van der Linde, co-editing Advances in Archaeological
Practice. I’m looking forward to trying to identify and
publish the best practices of our colleagues, and expanding my
own understanding of our changing profession as we work
together.
*One of the project volunteers was a photographer, then starting
his career as a writer. He documented our summers with fine art
images in a book, now out of print, intended to teach people about
archaeology survey: http://awestthatworks.com/delightmakers.html.
6 The SAA Archaeological Record • November 2015