'Business Carried them Far from Home': The Object Itinerary of a 19th-Century Antiquarian Collection

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: The Importance and Usefulness of Exploring Old or Forgotten Collections" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This paper examines nineteenth-century artifact collecting practices through analysis of legacy, orphaned, and curated collections at Woodville Plantation (36AL29), a historic house museum in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania. From the 1830s to 1920s, the Wrenshall family excavated and surface-collected objects from Native American sites across the eastern United States for display at their Woodville estate; however, like many contemporaneous antiquarians, they did not record detailed locational data. This project develops methods for establishing provenance within existing collections and applies a decolonizing framework to narrative construction at a small museum. Mobilizing archival data into object itineraries demonstrates spatiotemporal movement of artifacts between Indigenous ancestors, landforms, settler-colonists, domestic spaces, descendants, and museums. Mapping the relations of collections as fluid assemblages enables multiscalar analysis of nineteenth-century collecting, connecting the Wrenshalls to regional and global socioeconomic networks.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: The Importance and Usefulness of Exploring Old or Forgotten Collections   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology