Ashley Alvarado, M.A.
Collections Manager
Email | ama119@txstate.edu
Ashley Alvarado is an anthropological archaeologist and collections professional whose work centers on the people, communities, and cultures represented by the material objects and archaeological collections in her care. She holds an M.A. in Archaeology of Death and Memory from the University of Chester and a B.A. in Anthropology from Texas State University. Her academic and research interests include death and memorialization, material culture, ritual, memory, long-term curation and the ethical care of the dead, animal- and environmentally conscious repository practices, and the ways people use folklore and narrative traditions to understand and negotiate the world around them. She is particularly interested in how fairy tales and related folkloric forms negotiate fear, morality, power, identity, and transformation, and what their persistence in modern North American culture may reveal about the limits of narratives of rationality, progress, and disenchantment.
At the Center for Archaeological Studies at Texas State University, Ashley works in archaeological curation, collections management, rehabilitation, documentation, and long-term preservation. Alongside current cultural resource management projects, she oversees the rehabilitation of legacy and orphaned collections from agencies including TxDOT and the U.S. Forest Service. Her work includes accessioning, cataloging, rehousing, condition assessment, locational control, quality assurance, student training, and compliance with state and federal curation requirements.
Her earlier work at CAS was conducted through the Veterans Curation Program in support of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where she helped oversee the rehabilitation of federally owned archaeological and archival collections and trained student veterans in collections processing, artifact identification, and database management. Ashley is also ARPA trained and brings additional experience in cultural resource management archaeology, museum registration, collections assessment, exhibit installation, and artifact mount making.
Across these areas, Ashley approaches curation as both a technical and anthropological responsibility: preserving not only the archaeological record, but also the contexts, relationships, and human stories that give collections meaning.