Since the 1970s, Texas A&M’s Department of Anthropology has gathered artifacts from research across the state and beyond. Today, those objects form the Anthropology Research Collections, or ARC, a teaching and research resource tucked away on the third floor of the Anthropology Building.

Inside the ARC are thousands of items — from Civil War relics to prehistoric stone tools — each preserved so students can study, handle and learn from the past.

“It’s mainly … a collection filled with a variety of objects and artifacts from a wide variety of places,” anthropology junior Rafael Montemayor said. “We’ve got stuff from both Texas and then also outside of Texas, from like New Mexico, Mesa Verde areas. We even have a remote storage building with boxes stacked full of material — it’s too much to count.”

Montemayor, who is minoring in archaeology and museum studies, has spent his time at the ARC working on exhibit design. One current project focuses on Aggies missing in action from World War II and the Korean War.

“Essentially, one of the history students named Jackson Baker ran a thesis paper where he was … disputing some of the rosters that we had of missing-in-action Aggies and then saying that there was these other sources that we could use in order to figure out who was still missing,” Montemayor said. “He was able to bring down essentially a list of Aggies that have been missing since World War II to Korea … and then after that semester, I was employed by [Katie Custer Bojakowski, Ph.D.] in the summer to actually start making it into a real exhibit.”

Beyond exhibit work, Montemayor said the ARC’s importance lies in the research potential it preserves through saving items collected from previous research projects for future study. With so many artifacts representing only fragments of what once existed, the collection serves as a vital record that will help future researchers piece together the past.

“I think it’s important mainly due to the … research that can be done in the future,” Montemayor said. “Most of the things we have from the prehistoric era are mainly stone tools … we don’t really have any sort of biological or organic artifacts left over. And so for here, it’s really important … to maintain that so we can have an accurate idea of what it was like to live in times past … it gives us sort of like a lifeline in order to understand ourselves.”

When asked to choose a favorite among the many objects he’s encountered at the ARC, Montemayor didn’t hesitate to point to something large. For him, a large skull stands out among the thousands of artifacts stored in the collection.

“I think it was the woolly mammoth skull … or maybe it was a buffalo skull that we might have had,” Montemayor said. “Yeah, that’s probably my favorite.”

Anthropology senior Lily Dempsey, who also minors in archaeology and museum studies, helps manage the ARC’s teaching collections. These items, which have lost their original archaeological context, are no longer used for research but instead serve as classroom tools.

“Basically, it’s … archaeological materials that have either come from excavations done by the program in the past or we have our teaching collections … materials that we give out to professors or students to use in their classes,” Dempsey said. “The teaching collections are things that have lost their provenance … so they can’t be used for regular research … but they can be used to show to classes.”

The ARC houses a wide range of objects, from bones and ceramics to glass and archival site reports. But some items stretch far beyond recent history.

“We have kind of everything,” Dempsey said. “We have lithics which are stone tools, we have bones, we have a lot of archival materials like site reports … we have ceramics, we have glass, kind of everything.”

For Dempsey, preservation is about the stories these objects tell.

“Looking at objects that have been preserved can really give a good picture of what humans have been like through time,” Dempsey said. “Whether you’re going back hundreds of thousands of years ago or just a couple hundred years, they tell us so much about human history.”

For Bojakowski, director of the ARC and of A&M’s museum studies program, the collection is more than just storage — it is a way to connect students directly with history.

“The Anthropology Research Collection grew out of the research being conducted in anthropology and elsewhere,” Bojakowski said. “Most of our professors are engaged in research one way or another … and through, especially, past archaeological research … objects have been transferred to the department. So we created this collection to be good stewards to make sure we’re preserving the objects, but also that they’re there for research purposes and educational purposes.”

The ARC contains a couple thousand objects, from 10,000-year-old cave finds in Texas to Civil War artifacts from Camp Ford in Tyler. Bojakowski said many items came from archaeological excavations conducted by faculty in the 1980s and 1990s, and today the ARC functions as a small to medium-sized university repository.

As curator, Bojakowski oversees the legal and ethical responsibilities of the collection, ensuring objects are properly documented and accessible for teaching. Students gain hands-on curatorial experience through paid assistantships and internships, helping them prepare for graduate school or professional work.

But for Bojakowski, the most powerful part of the ARC is when objects serve as a physical reminder of thousands of years of history.

“I can get up and lecture about history or about archaeology, but if I take objects from our collection and I hand it to you, then you get to see that and you get to touch it,” Bojakowski said. “And I think it makes it more meaningful … holding something in their hand that whether it was 10,000 years ago or 300,000 years ago, that somebody created.”

Bojakowski said the ARC is a resource for the entire university, not just anthropology students.

“It really is not just for anthropologists or archaeologists,” Bojakowski said. “Museums are for everyone, and we use the ARC as a learning laboratory. Students from geology to history to museum studies all benefit from what’s here.”

For the students and faculty who work with it, the ARC is less about dusty shelves and more about making connections — between people, between disciplines and between the past and the present.

“I like anthropology because it’s holistic,” Montemayor said. “You sort of just … have to pull from so many different areas. And it’s very holistic in its methodology and sourcing of information, so you get to do a bunch of really cool stuff all the time.”