ETSU, foundations explore partnership for excavations

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

Saltville’s town council is considering a partnership between the Saltville Foundation and the paleontology department of East Tennessee State University that would conduct the annual summer excavations in the well fields and temporarily curate any fossils found.
Under the proposed agreement, the state-of-the-art East Tennessee State University and General Shale Brick Natural History Museum and Visitor Center that opened at Gray, Tenn., last year would accession fossils for stabilization, preservation and storage. The agreement would provide for the immediate transfer of the fossils back to the Museum of the Middle Appalachians in Saltville when it has a paleontological curator on staff, climate control, and a specimen catalog system.
Specimen cabinets, a fourth requirement in the agreement, are already in place at MOMA.
Attorney and Saltville Foundation member Byrum Giesler told the town council Tuesday that paleontologist Dr. Blaine Shubert at ETSU is “extremely interested in Saltville” and in conducting “first-class digs” to get Saltville in the scientific journals.
Excavations by volunteers overseen by the Saltville Foundation have been held in cooperation with groups from ETSU and Radford University in the past. Oversight by a single paleontologist with controls for excavation procedures would ensure the validation of finds necessary for their acceptance by the scientific community.
Such validation would be especially necessary if archaeological artifacts, say stone tools related to the earliest people in the Saltville Valley, are found in association with fossils. The position in which an artifact is found can reveal much more about its importance than can the artifact itself. Context is everything, archaeologists say.
Saltville’s well fields preserve fossils deposited in them because the bluish clay mud there excludes the oxygen that drives decay of organic matter. Fossils of Ice Age animals have been found there for centuries. The rich fossil deposit prompted Giesler to call Saltville a “world site” for the study Ice Age fauna.
The town is involved in approving the agreement because the proposal conflicts with the town’s antiquities ordinance that stipulates fossils and artifacts found in Saltville belong to the town and must stay there.
The idea of ownership concerned council member Neil Johnson who contended ETSU would own the fossils until they could be returned to Saltville.
“They don’t want to own them,” Giesler said, explaining that ownership is not a legal term, but rather constitutes a set of rights regarding objects. The matter at hand, he said, is one of responsibility. ETSU would be responsible for the fossils until MOMA could assume responsibility for them.
“The Antiquities Act will need to be reworded to let ETSU accession the fossils or the language of the agreement must be recast so it would not run afoul of the act,” said Saltville Town Attorney Chip Burkholder. “We’re talking more about possession and custody rather than ownership.”
Ultimately, the council tabled the matter pending discussion about amending the antiquities ordinance to allow the agreement, or wording the agreement so that it remains within provisions of the ordinance.