Lives of Baskets, Lives of Weavers: Using Digital Heritage and Interdisciplinary Research to Restore Social Memory

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Defining Perishables: The How, What, and Why of Perishables and Their Importance in Understanding the Past" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In “Entangled,” his landmark theoretical work on the relationship between human beings and material culture, Ian Hodder emphasized the importance of understanding how things endure differently than people. Thus longer-lived objects can bridge gaps and carry meaning between multiple human generations. In Indigenous California, woven baskets represent a defining aspect of material culture and are widely considered to be animate beings with a form of membership in tribal communities, even when they have become alienated therefrom. At the University of California, Merced, a group of graduate students, working together with Indigenous basketweavers and local museum curators, developed the Baskets 2 Bytes project, which digitized baskets in small museum collections in order to make them available to their communities of origin as 3D images. During this heavily collaborative process, the team discovered that several of the baskets studied had belonged to Indigenous women, including Dulcie Beal and Lucy Hite, who were both famous weavers and important historical figures. Together with archival research and ethnographic interviews, these baskets and their 3D reproductions have become the anchor points for narratives that restore lost heritage and expand our knowledge of the complex interactions between people and the things they create.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Defining Perishables: The How, What, and Why of Perishables and Their Importance in Understanding the Past   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37469.0