Bio

Karen Martindale earned her BA in Anthropology from Rice University in 2011 and her MA in Anthropology from Texas A&M University in 2015. While attending A&M, she specialized in artifact conservation and worked at the Conservation Research Laboratory as a graduate assistant. At the CRL, she conserved artifacts from a variety of maritime and terrestrial projects, including La Belle, USS Westfield, and CSS Georgia. After graduating, she worked as a conservator at the Queen Anne’s Revenge Shipwreck Project in North Carolina, conserving artifacts from Blackbeard’s flagship.

She returned to the CRL in 2018 as a supervisor for the “clean” side of the lab, and wears many hats in her role. Karen’s focus is on small artifacts of any material, but she also takes lead on artifact documentation at all stages of conservation, maintains project databases, manages storage, and does her best to keep every project organized from start to finish. Outside of her normal duties at CRL, Karen enjoys talking to the public about the importance of conservation and the interesting work we do. Since 2021, she has been a member of the board of TX-CERA, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating Texas cultural heritage institutions on how best to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters in their collections.