After decades of work in Utah’s archeology field, Barbara Frank has received a fellow award from the Utah Professional Archaeological Council. Frank has influenced archaeology for years through her work at Southern Utah University, where she heads the school’s archaeology repository.
SUU’s archaeology repository was founded in the 1960s by Rick Thompson. He started as a history professor at SUU but had interest and training in the archeology field. The school allowed him to teach some archeology courses and begin the archeology repository.
After joining the University of Utah and the University of California, Los Angeles on a few excavations around Parowan, Thompson realized the area’s potential and began running field schools. In 1985, Frank came to SUU to help him run the field school program.
“Rick passed away in 1995, and I just took over the running of the repository because it’s an important facility for the government,” Frank said.
Though the repository is tucked away on the bottom floor of the Electronic Learning Center, it serves as a passageway to Utah’s history, storing many artifacts that belonged to the native tribes and Indigenous people that inhabited Cedar City long before SUU. Some of Frank’s favorite finds are a paint pot with perfectly preserved red hematite and blue malachite pigment and human coprolites, commonly known as human feces.
SUU’s archeology repository has been a place where a variety of people go for undergrad, PhD and personal research.
“I’m an expert on the local culture, so people come to talk to me about that, and I give talks for local societies,” Frank said. “When people want to come in here and study the collections, I get the materials for them and help them find what they need.”
When the U.S. Forest Service hires new archaeologists for the summer, they will visit the archeology repository, where Frank shows off artifacts and talks with them about local archaeology. Frank noted that talking about the field is always fascinating to her, but what she enjoys most is working with students.
“I’ve influenced a lot of people who have become archaeologists in the state of Utah,” Frank stated. “My influence has been with students, and that is what I still do.”
She mentioned names like Ian Wright, a graduate of SUU who now works for the state historic preservation office as the Utah Cultural Site Steward, and Derinna Kopp, who attended one of SUU’s field schools and currently works as the forensic archaeologist for the state of Utah.
Anthropology was brought back as a minor in the fall of 2010 and officially reestablished as a major in the 2015 fall semester. Though Frank and the repository are not directly part of the anthropology department, they have a close relationship that has brought many benefits to both departments at the university.
Now that anthropology is part of SUU’s curriculum again, more students have been introduced to archeology through their courses, leading them to volunteer time to the repository or even pursue internships for class credit.
“This provides another piece of archeology — of an archeological experience — that you don’t necessarily get in the classroom, and that’s dealing with artifacts, how artifacts are stored, what we can learn from artifacts,” said Frank.
Having a department with close ties to the repository also opens doors for more grants to fund Frank’s work at SUU. This money has sustained the repository in recent years, keeping this hub of southern Utah’s history alive on campus.
The archaeology repository is located in Room 101-A of the ELC and open to visitors whenever staff is present, which is usually Wednesday and Thursday afternoons. Articles and photographs of the work the repository has done throughout the years can be found on SUU’s digital library.
Author: Heather Turner
Photographer: Lily Brunson
Editor: Lily Brunson
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