By Jessica Edwards

When Jerrie Clarke visited museums as a little girl, she wanted nothing more than to handle the objects on display. That she was forbidden to do so indelibly shaped her future.

"I was mad I couldn’t touch anything," Clarke said about those early visits. "I told (my mother) I’d work in a museum one day so I could touch the artifacts."

Clarke made good on her childhood ambitions. Currently the director of the Sheldon Museum and Cultural Center, Clarke has worked in museums the past 28 years, and has catalogued artifacts on five archaeological excavations in the Middle East.

Although she sometimes visited museums with her family growing up, Clarke said no one else in her family was particularly interested in history. The history-rich culture of Utah and of her hometown of Salt Lake City played a part, as did the frequent westerns Clarke grew up watching.

Clarke studied history in college, and got her first museum job as an archivist at a Salt Lake history museum in 1980. She came to Alaska one summer five years later, and after returning south to complete graduate work, Clarke settled in Anchorage.

She first came to the Sheldon Museum 10 years ago on grant funding secured by former museum director and curator C.J. Jones. Clarke worked as a contractor here for a decade. When Jones retired as museum director, she hoped Clarke would take her place.

At the time, Clarke was bound for an archaeological dig in Egypt. She took the job two years later after the departure of director Addison Field.

"I’m so thrilled she’s there," said Jones. Clarke’s familiarity with the museum’s collections and operations gave her insight into what Jones called a huge job. "It’s absolutely an overwhelming responsibility."

Jones said Clarke’s tenure was special because she had developed a relationship with museum founder Lib Hakkinen. "She knew Lib," she said. "She has a connection with the founding family."

Most of Clarke’s museum experience is in local history museums similar to the Sheldon Museum, which focus on the history and people of a particular area. "It’s very interesting work," she said. "It’s interesting to learn about an area (through) its artifacts and artwork… History gives us a sense of place and pride, a bit of grounding."

For Clarke, the job is hardly confined to what is dusty, dry and old. That’s part of the reason she enjoys the local museum and its busy schedule of exhibits, concerts, and presentations.

She visualizes the museum as a vital community center. "We’re pretty isolated here. We have to make our own entertainment.

"It also makes the job more fun and interesting for me. I’m able to bring other interests of mine like music and reading into the museum and make it not just art on the wall."

Her vision for the museum includes continuing the work of former directors Jones and Field organizing the collection and making it researchable.

She said adding and updating exhibits would provide something new for locals. The industrial history of the valley, for example, including canneries, timber and commercial fishing, are not addressed in the museum, and Clarke hopes to change that. Other ideas are shifting the size and makeup of permanent exhibits, and addressing the interactions between different groups in the Chilkat Valley. "Right now, Natives and the pioneers are upstairs and downstairs (respectively)," she said. "I’d like to show the interface of groups, add a little more interpretation."

Eventually, Clarke would like to introduce interactive electronics to the exhibits. Adding electronics allows exhibits to be enriched for viewers with sound, such as the voices of the native elders and pioneers that have been recorded in the museum’s oral history archives. "That will take grant writing and lots of money."

Although her degrees are in American culture and folklore, Clarke is also fascinated by the Middle East, and has found an outlet working on archaeological digs the past 20 years.

"I’m not an archaeologist, I’m a curator," Clarke told a group recently at the Sheldon Museum’s Brown Bag Lunch. "But I’d love to play one on TV."

Since working on her first dig in Syria in 1984, Clarke has supported excavations in Egypt and Sudan, cataloguing, archiving, and sometimes restoring ancient artifacts.

In late 2003 through early 2004, Clarke joined Egyptologist Matthew Adams on a dig in Abydos, Egypt, where she proved herself so useful Adams asked her to return the following year. She said Adams was amazed at what a professional curator could accomplish.

Clarke has worked three seasons at Abydos, Egypt, home of the first Egyptian pharaohs, on the banks of the Nile River.

Clarke and fellow visiting workers lived in the desert outside the modern town of Abydos in an isolated, walled compound with a central courtyard and whitewashed walls. Guards were posted to protect the foreign archeologists and staff – between 12 and 20 at a time – from terrorist attacks, and all visits outside required a police escort.

Clarke spent most of her days in the compound’s archive room, cataloguing and packaging artifacts for storage. She handled chunks of the temple of Osiris, engraved styla, pottery shards with inscribed graffiti, intact ceramics, bones and ancient jewelry. Many of the objects had been dated to 3,500 B.C.