February 14, 2023
Last week we lost friend and colleague Teka McGlothlin. Teka was the Survey’s Registrar and was a Historical Archeologist by training. Her MA Thesis focused on Springfield Ranch, part of the larger Cane Hill community, which was an early European settlement in NW Arkansas. She found Cherokee type-face for a printing press that was being used to print bibles in the Cherokee syllabary and was later co-opted by the Union during the Civil War to print a newspaper, the Buck and Ball.
Archeology was not Teka’s first career and at one point she even processed fingerprints. But she enrolled at the UA in 2008 to do an MA in Anthropology. She quickly got an hourly job in the Registrar’s office at the Survey and has been with us ever since. She was hired as Assistant Registrar in 2014 and was promoted to Registrar in 2019. In the Registrar’s office she oversaw record keeping of archeological paperwork and records across the state and worked to keep them all in order. The Survey keeps track of internal paperwork, records, and artifacts as well as that of contractors, other State Agencies, and Federal Agencies.
Teka also administered large grants from the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Commission (ANCRC) for work to bring collections across the Survey up-to-standards. The Survey was awarded multiple grants for this work over the years and Teka was in charge of hiring and training students to carry out the processing. She was also instrumental in creating the AACI (Arkansas Archeological Collections Initiative), which is a digital collections documentation interface accessed through an iPad that creates an inventory in a relational database. All artifacts at the Survey will eventually be processed through the system to give a complete inventory of what is in the collections at all research stations across the state.
