Artifacts and Hangovers
Some mornings stay with you for all the wrong reasons.
One Friday morning, late in the summer of 1991, was one of those mornings.
I was living near Cortez, Colorado and working at Complete Archaeological Service Associates, a large cultural resource management firm better known in the area as CASA. My title at CASA was Manager, Technology Services. My academic background, though, was in anthropology and archaeology. That experience often pulled me into field projects and artifact collection documentation.
On this particular Friday morning, that meant I was scheduled to photograph a large set of Anasazi ceramics from a recent excavation project in the Four Corners region. Unfortunately, it also happened to be the morning after a legendary archaeological field crew party. In those days, most archaeologists were holdovers from the 70s, hippies or former hippies at heart, and they approached a good party with the same enthusiasm they’d find in smoke drifting from a carved pipe under desert stars.
The lab's studio was quiet, except for the hum of tungsten lights. I worked from a tripod, a Canon T90 SLR paired with a Canon FD 28–55mm macro lens aimed down at centuries-old pottery set against black velvet as a backdrop. The smell of the lights, the heat, and the weight of my hangover mixed into something unforgettable.
Still, I focused.
Each pot, cracked, patterned, or perfectly imperfect, demanded patience and care. What started as a miserable morning became an unexpected study in endurance, both for me and the pottery.
Looking back now, these images remind me that creativity and the art of the create often happen in less than ideal circumstances. Those Anasazi vessels had survived time, pressure, and fire. I was just surviving my own little trial by tungsten lights and hangover. Yet somehow, in all that haze, I managed to make something that has lasted, a record of craftsmanship both ancient and modern, separated by centuries but linked through the same impulse to create.
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Technical Notes:
All images were photographed in the summer of 1991 in Cortez, Colorado, using a Canon T90 SLR and a Canon FD 28–55mm f/3.5–4.5 Macro lens. Each artifact was shot on black velvet under continuous tungsten lighting. Original color slide film was scanned and converted to high-contrast black-and-white for publication. Lightroom was recently used to enhance the contrast, clarity, and texture of the images and present them in a 4:5 ratio.
