October 17, 2010

Samuel Dellinger (left) was eager to prevent what he believed was the pillaging of Arkansas’s archaeological sites by out-of-state museums. As the curator of the University of Arkansas Museum in Fayetteville (Washington County) for thirty years, beginning in 1926, he actively pursued the collecting of artifacts from sites in Arkansas. As a result, he and his staff were able to build the museum’s archaeology collection into one of the finest in the nation. Unfortunately, public access to the collection became very limited when the museum closed in 2003.