Museums, Collections, and Repatriation (Other Keyword)
51-75 (128 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Frontiers in Animal Management: Unconventional Species, New Methods, and Understudied Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hawaiian featherwork constitutes a treasured element of Hawaiian cultural heritage. Feather artefacts curated in museums today were acquired between the late 18th and the early 20th centuries and it is clear that their production required thousands of feathers sourced from Hawaiian forest...
Examining Turkey Husbandry in the Northern Southwest Using Legacy Museum Collections (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Domestication, Husbandry and Management in North America and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I examine some of the details of turkey husbandry by analyzing avian remains and associated material culture, including feathers and cordage. The North American turkey (Meleagris gallopavo spp.) has had a significant and enduring presence in many of the...
Exhibit Development Through Partnerships with American Indian Tribes and Museums (2018)
Decisions regarding the use of museum collections in exhibits that interpret the history and culture of American Indians have often been made by non-natives, without the input of the people the exhibits are about. History Colorado was recently presented with a situation that allowed the museum to do the opposite. The Ute Indian Museum is one of History Colorado’s community properties and is one, if not the only, state-owned museum dedicated to an American Indian group-the Ute people. In 2013,...
Exploring Collaborative Curation of North American Human Remains (2018)
In 2016, The Field Museum was awarded a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The overall mission of this project is to "research, explore, develop, and implement thoughtful, practical, and forward-thinking practices for the ethical care of human remains." The project is working to bring together stakeholders from collections-holding institutions, scientific research institutions, and Native American and First Nations communities to move beyond...
The Female Terracotta Sculpture at the North Carolina Museum of Art: Pastiche or Fake? (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 2" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Large-scale female terracotta sculptures were extensively produced in the Mixtequilla region of Veracruz during the Late Classic period. It is likely that numbers of these sculptures were looted and smuggled into the United States prior to the 1970 UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property. This paper focuses the female terracotta...
From a Cave near Tehuacán? Reconstructing Object Histories of Looted Postclassic Mesoamerican Turquoise Mosaics (2018)
The mid-20th-century market for pre-Columbian antiquities is notoriously opaque. Riddled as this moment in the market is with stories of looting, forgery and deceit, the period between roughly 1950 and 1990 is also the era in which significant parts of today’s best-known museum collections of pre-Columbian art were formed. Because of the practices of art dealers many pieces that once formed part of the same original deposit are now scattered over the globe. Any possible information on the ...
From Grandma’s Attic to Amnesty Programs: Adventures in Accessioning Archaeological Collections (2019)
This is an abstract from the "To Curate or Not to Curate: Surprises, Remorse, and Archaeological Grey Area" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is said that the best deaccession policy is a strong accession policy - never accession anything that is beyond your collection scope and institutional mission, and you will never need to deaccession. In a perfect museum world all incoming collections will meet institutional mission, scope of collection...
Going Retro: Reconstructing NMAI Collections Histories (2018)
The National Museum of the American Indian and its predecessor, the Museum of the American Indian, have long suffered a reputation for poorly documented collections. Assuming that documentation never existed or was at some point discarded; researchers have been largely unable to take full advantage of the scientific and research value of NMAI collections. In 2010, NMAI staff began a project to overturn this reputation. By retroactively implementing an accession lot system and creating virtual...
The Good, the Bad, and the Not So Great: Archaeological Curation at the New Jersey State Museum (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Navigating Ethical and Legal Quandaries in Modern Archaeological Curation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Unlike most state museums, the New Jersey State Museum operates directly under the Department of State, and this has its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, we enjoy interacting with the public through programming, exhibitions, research, presentations, and publications. On the other hand, budget cuts,...
The Hand Site, Revisited: A Collections-Focused Approach to Recentering Deep History in the Lower Middle Atlantic (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reviews the Hand Site (44SN22) Reassessment Project, and broadly explores the reevaluation of existing collections as an avenue for decolonization. The Hand site is a complex, multicomponent site located on the Nottoway River in southeastern Virginia. Intensive excavations in the 1960s revealed...
How the NMNH Rises to the Challenge of Using the Best Available Documentation for Repatriation (2018)
The NMNH Repatriation Program is charged under the NMAI Act to use the "best available scientific and historical documentation" to identify the origins of the human remains and objects in its collections. The nature of the museum means that the office can rely on the scholarship of Smithsonian curators for assistance. In addition, copious records in the National Anthropological Archive and in the Smithsonian Archives are present that relate to the collections. However, the records sometimes...
How to Update a Classic: The Renewal of Here, Now and Always at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (2018)
Here, Now and Always (HNA) opened at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC) in Santa Fe, NM in 1997. This permanent exhibition is an introduction to the peoples of the US Southwest and was the first in the US to be curated by an expansive community. It was developed through the participation of more than thirty individuals and with seven core community curators. The community voices dominate the exhibit text and the community curators determined the exhibition message, object selection,...
Implementing NAGPRA: A Look at BLM’s Experiences in Alaska, 1990–2017 (2018)
The 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) resulted in new responsibilities and challenges for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). These included working with museums and tribes concerning certain items in museums removed from federal land sometimes more than a century earlier. The BLM in Alaska has been actively involved with NAGPRA work since the early 1990s, and has completed numerous Federal Register Notices and repatriations with more in...
Innovation and Curation: Conservation and Access of University-Held Collections for Research (2018)
The Duckworth Collection is one of the world's largest repositories of human remains, numbering approximately 18,000 individuals. These range from blood samples, to hair bundles, single bones, complete skeletons, mummies, and decorated skulls, and are widely used for scientific research. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, anthropological and biological research gave us a greater understanding of human diversity, much of it based on anatomical evidence. Cambridge was at the forefront of this...
Interpretive Strata at Tijeras Pueblo (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and Public Education at Tijeras Pueblo, New Mexico" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tijeras Pueblo Archaeological Site offers a variety of integrated resources that encourage appreciation of and respect for traditional pueblo lifeways past and present. Informative strata comprise a self-guided trail, museum exhibits, a pueblo garden and native plant identification. Educational...
Investigating a Shelter in Oklahoma Schools: Bringing Museum Artifacts into the Classroom (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Touching the Past: Public Archaeology Engagement through Existing Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Oklahoma, giving K-12 students hands-on experiences with real artifacts can be challenging when collections are inaccessible in museum repositories. To make archaeology accessible to all students at the national level, Project Archaeology’s Investigating Shelter (2009) for grades 3-5 supplements social...
Iroquoian Chunkey (2018)
Iroquoians played the hoop and pole game in Historic times, but there are no descriptions of Iroquoians playing chunkey, a variant of hoop and pole that makes use of a rolled stone disk. This has led to a widespread belief that chunkey was not played by Iroquoians. However, a symmetrical stone disk was recovered from the Eaton site, a mid-sixteenth century Erie village. Other researchers report stone disks from the following groups: Neutral (Bill Fox), Erie (Joshua Kwoka), Seneca (Martha...
Japanese Archaeological Artifacts in the U.S. Museums: A Case Study from the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 (2018)
There are thousands of Japanese archaeological artifacts stored in the major arts and archaeology museums of the United States. Many of the collections came to this country during the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. In those days, archaeological objects left their home countries more readily than today and reached at the foreign museums through expeditions, inter-institutional exchanges, purchases from private art galleries, and gifts from wealthy art collectors....
Keeping Track of it All: Building a Repository Database from the Ground Up (2019)
This is an abstract from the "How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Office of the Wyoming State Archaeologist (OWSA) and the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office are shifting towards digital-only submissions for professional archaeological projects through new and interconnected database-and-web-interface systems going live in...
Looted and Recovered Artifacts: The Art of Deciding What to Curate as Demonstrated Through the Cerberus Collection (2019)
This is an abstract from the "To Curate or Not to Curate: Surprises, Remorse, and Archaeological Grey Area" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) of Utah, much like other federal agencies with a law enforcement arm, recover looted or distributed artifacts through various scenarios including cases and forfeitures. The Cerberus Collection is BLM-Utah’s largest collection obtained under these circumstances, consisting of...
Lost and Found and the Peculiar Lives of Collections: Examples of Bridging Ethical Stewardship and Research with Florida National Park Legacy Collections (2019)
This is an abstract from the ""Re-excavating" Legacy Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many of our culture histories and chronologies were built by early generations of archaeologists who targeted superlative sites, often excavating voluminous areas or entire sites. Decades later, many of these collections remain uncatalogued, unstudied, or worse—relegated to garages, garbage piles, or lost completely. Contemporary archeologists and...
Making the Most of Salmon Pueblo’s Enormous Dataset: The SPARC Project (2018)
The ruins of Salmon Pueblo were excavated by Cynthia Irwin-Williams, her staff, and students in the 1970s. A huge archive of material culture, photographs, excavation records, and analytical data was produced documenting Salmon’s Chacoan and post-Chacoan occupations. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Salmon Pueblo Archaeological Research Collection (SPARC) Project was created with the goal of making the enormous Salmon dataset available to scholars through an...
The Mesoamerican Laboratory Ceramic Type Collections Project at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mesoamerican ceramic collections at the Peabody Museum represent the work of an array of influential scholars who collected and analyzed them, many of whom were pioneers in ceramic analysis, including Alfred Kidder, Eric Thompson, Anne Shepard, and Gordon Willey. Archaeologists in many cases still use the methods established by these scholars, and we often...
The Middle to Upper Paleolithic Site of Abri des Merveilles in Southwestern France: An Assessment of the Integrity and Research Potential of an Historically-Excavated Museum Collection (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As museum shelves buckle under the weight of virtually forgotten boxes of artifacts, many institutions are questioning the future curation of these historically excavated materials. Much of this material is comprised of Paleolithic artifacts excavated during the infancy of American archaeology abroad. This project was undertaken to evaluate the integrity of a...
Mounds, Museum Visitors, and You (the Archaeologist) (2018)
During the 18th century, European-Americans created a myth regarding the earthen mounds found throughout the eastern United States. This myth indicated that a western people, possibly the Lost Tribe of Israel, had inhabited North America and established cities throughout this region. They then succumbed to Native American savagery and brutality and were eradicated. Over time, archaeologists disproved the myth by conducting excavations and demonstrated the cultural similarities between the...