Conservation and Curation (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacy Drake. Marla MacKinnon. America Guerra.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanne Gallagher.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Museum studies and Archaeology have had an interrelationship in pursuits of knowledge and perceptions of visitors. Different interpretations of Indigenous peoples have also evolved in these two fields, and within the last few decades these representations have affected Indigenous Peoples, Museum institutions and visitors. For museum studies, there has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aspen Kemmerlin.

This is an abstract from the "Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Archaeology Classroom" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent trends in archaeological pedagogy include the adoption of active learning models as well as courses that incorporate community and public archaeology frameworks. These shifts have primarily been centered on archaeological field schools and on-campus excavations. In contrast, despite the growing concern over legacy and orphaned...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Palus.

This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part III)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Federal agencies and repositories holding federal collections have been bound to curation standards often developed without consideration for nontangible values and needs and a legacy of collecting practices intended to preserve the past yet uninformed by the interests and concerns of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuko Shiratori. Ángel González López.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Hornbeck. Emily Kaplan.

This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Field Museum’s collection holds the only known Colonial era tiana, or carved wooden stool, from Peru. This important object was among the inaugural collections at the Museum, entering the collection at its founding in...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Guilliam Hurte, Sr.. Gabriel Brown.

One of the unique opportunities given veterans within the Veterans Curation Program (VCP) is professional training in high quality digital artifact photography that far exceeds the quality of photography practiced by most Cultural Resource Management firms. A representative sample consisting of 10% of every collection processed by VCP is photographed by the veteran technicians and subsequently combined with the finalized collection. These digital images are reviewed and a selection is eventually...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Price. Alexis O'Donnell. William Marquardt. Heather Edgar.

This is an abstract from the "Historical Archaeologies of the American Southwest, 1800 to Today" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological legacy collections found in museums and repositories across the nation continue to present challenging and intriguing research opportunities. Basic processing of artifacts and field notes within these older collections can itself feel like an excavation and the slow process of addressing an institution’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bethanny Prascik. Bryan Hill II. Olivia Jones.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although legacy collections are rarely discussed explicitly in research and are often portrayed as subpar due to the lack of publication or the outdated excavation methods, we argue that legacy data is an important resource in archaeology. Legacy collections provide unique datasets that are both easily accessible and readily available. The Archaeology Lab...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brooke Morgan. Logan Pappenfort. Margaret Alway.

This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part IV): NAGPRA in Policy, Protocol, and Practice" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dickson Mounds Museum (DMM) in central Illinois has been ground zero for the intersection of archaeological practice, Native American rights, and the responsibilities of a state museum. For over sixty years, DMM presented viewing of an open excavation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristine Clark. Tia Alquist.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At Arizona State University’s (ASU) Research Lab in Teotihuacan, Mexico, countless boxes represent almost limitless opportunities for research. As the initial director, George Cowgill generously provided archaeologists with free storage space. However, decades have since passed without appropriate oversight, organization, and documentation. This means that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Stone.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As part of a Fulbright–Creative Ireland Museum Fellowship collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution (Washington DC), research will be conducted to establish best practice for the curation and storage of environmental remains from archaeological investigations and establish codes of practice for digital archiving of ecofact material, addressing pressing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Martine. Emily Palus.

This is an abstract from the "Ideas, Ethical Ideals, and Museum Practice in North American Archaeological Collections" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Federal archaeological collections acquisition and management practices are guided by decades-old law and policy, intended to uphold aspirational and perhaps unachievable expectations for preserving our nation’s heritage. The resulting “curation crises,” or, rather, the system that has become the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Swogger.

When is a copy not a fake? In 2014, the Carriacou Archaeology Project (University of Oregon; University of London) excavated a unique stone zemi at the Grand Bay site on the island of Carriacou, Grenada. The decision was made to create casts of the zemi in order to facilitate simultaneous display of the object in multiple island museums. It was hoped this would allow both museums to advocate the small island of Carriacou as a site of particular archaeological significance, to stimulate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Lattanzi.

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,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alanna Radlo-Dzur.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A distinctive tradition of intricately sculpted metates—commonly known as grinding stones—flourished along the Pacific coast of Nicaragua and Costa Rica circa 300-900 CE. The Greater Nicoya burials that contain carved metates often include grave goods made of precious materials such as jade and gold. As a result, these sites have been subject to looting since...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Miller.

This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Grolier Codex was reportedly found with other objects, including the Kislak box, the Dumbarton Oaks turquoise mask, and other objects in the United States and abroad. In this brief talk, these objects and their context will be addressed, as well as the likelihood of their having been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Holguin. Eleanor Fishburn. Scott Sunell. Jennifer Perry. Gina Lucas.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project is a collaborative effort driven by a multi-tribal Chumash community to reawaken cultural knowledge while simultaneously generating new archaeological data about the well-preserved Chumash village of l’akayamu. Located on limuw (Santa Cruz Island, the largest of California’s Channel Islands), l’akayamu is a historical village that was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxine McBrinn. Lenora Tsosie. Joseph Aguilar.

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,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark McCoy. Mehrdad Aghagholizadeh. Nicos Makris. Mara Mulrooney. Britton Shepardson.

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeologies and Islands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Monuments are a critical window into people’s values, beliefs, and social memories. The destruction of monuments is especially important since it can shed light on how these aspects of societies change over time. We describe new research aimed at understanding the destruction of moai (statues) on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Our first goal is to build a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Benden.

This is an abstract from the "Ideas, Ethical Ideals, and Museum Practice in North American Archaeological Collections" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2021, caretakers and users of archaeological collections participated in a Wenner-Gren funded workshop that considered the social lives of archaeological repositories. The goal was to understand the repository as a site of social relations among and between stakeholders. Together, collections...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Dale.

This is an abstract from the "Historical Archaeologies of the American Southwest, 1800 to Today" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From the 1980s to 1990s, Northern Arizona University ethnomusicologist Joann Kealiinohomoku collected artifacts she found in the backyard of her Flagstaff home and kept them in a variety of food jars. While Dr. Kealiinohomoku had no discernible methodology in collecting the artifacts and left behind no notes or evidence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley D'Elia. Natalia Miles.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Work by Chronicle Heritage" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigenous history has been told through the lens of outsiders claiming authority on the subjects with little credibility given to traditional knowledge of the descendant communities who remain (Bernardini et al. 2021). There is an abundance of Indigenous Knowledge communities can share with archaeologists to help insert Indigenous voices...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fumi Arakawa. Sara Harper. Robin Chistofani. Carly Johnston. Nathan Craig.

This is an abstract from the "Outreach and Education: Examples of Approaches and Strategies from the Pacific Northwest" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Academic archaeological research is a multi-step process that generally involves research design development, fieldwork, analyzing artifacts and data, writing, publishing results, and disseminating findings (sometimes to the public). In this paper, we argue that archaeologists need to do more at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Trisha Biers. Marta Mirazón Lahr.

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...