Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections

Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections," at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

What value are old collections that sit in a repository collecting dust and rust? If we are retaining objects simply for the sake of doing so, then their potential for providing new insights is zero. The field mantra of “keep everything” is at times the bane of any curation facility that has a mandate to care for its collections in perpetuity. Yet, researchers are finding new ways to re-examine and scrutinize long forgotten collections that continue to provide new insights about the past. This session sponsored by the SHA’s Committee on Collections and Curation, explores the continuing expansion of collections-based research in historical archaeology.

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-14 of 14)

  • Documents (14)

Documents
  • Becoming Historic? Reassessing the Significance of Mid-Twentieth Century Debris in Nineteenth Century Cellars (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori C. (1,2) Thompson. Jeffrey Glover.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) archaeological collection has been providing students and faculty at Georgia State University (GSU) the chance to reinvestigate aspects of Atlanta’s past through this large legacy collection. Almost 500 boxes of material were excavated in...

  • Building a Shared Database: The Comparative Mission Archaeology Portal (CMAP), Struggles, Successes, and Future Directions (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Gifford Waters.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Historical Archaeology program at the Florida Museum of Natural History recently launched the Comparative Mission Archaeology Portal (CMAP) as part of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant. Building off of and modifying the database created by the Digital Archaeological...

  • Discovery Through Rehabilitation: The Betty Veatch Potomac Creek Collection (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Cagney.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 2017, archaeologists at American University in Washington, D.C. rediscovered the Betty Veatch collection sitting forgotten in the lab— boxes of prehistoric and historic artifacts alongside Veatch’s personal journals, field logs, and photographs from her 1970s-1980s surveys. After an...

  • Emergence and Evolution of a Colonial Urban Economy: Charleston, South Carolina (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Carla Hadden. John G. Jones. Sarah Platt. Laurie Reitsema. Elizabeth J. Reitz. Hayden Smith. Martha Zierden.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. We explore the emergence and evolution of a colonial urban center from the perspective of its animal economy in order to clarify relationships between rural and urban societies and the impact of those relationships on colonial environments.The project expands upon long-term studies of...

  • Facing a Mystery: An Anthropomorphic Clay Head (Re)Discovered at Nomini Plantation, Westmoreland County, Virginia (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren K. McMillan. Ethan Knick.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Excavated in the 1970s by the Archeological Society of Virginia, the Nomini Plantation (44WM12) midden assemblage represents an extraordinary collection of mid- to late-seventeenth-century material culture, including not only European goods but also pipe-making waste and an array of clay...

  • Getting to the Bottom of the Barrel: A Fresh Look at Some Old Features from Albany’s Big Digs (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael T. Lucas. Matthew Kirk. Kristin O'Connell. Susan Winchell-Sweeney.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 1998, Hartgen Archeological Associates, Inc., excavated 3 small late-eighteenth century barrel features in downtown Albany. Wooden barrels were commonly used as liners for wells, privies, and sumps, however these three pits were unusual in that they were located on the interior of the...

  • Home Space: Mobility and Movement in the Creation of a Working-class Urban Landscape (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander D. Keim. Andrew Webster.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Historical archaeologists often interpret artifacts through the lens of household and family as the location for the development of practice and identity. Economic uncertainty for working-class households in historic urban contexts, however, meant that some families moved as many as...

  • ʻIolani Palace Revisited: Preliminary Zooarchaeological Reanalysis of a Legacy Collection (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only David Ingleman.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. From the 1840s to the 1890s, the ʻIolani Palace, in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, was the political center of the Hawaiian Kingdom. In the 1960s and 1970s, archaeologists excavated rich midden deposits and other features from the palace grounds for the purposes of cultural resource management. Just...

  • Last Call! One More For The Road: Dissertating With Existing Collections (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan GW Allison.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the pursuit of acquiring knowledge a common culture of archaeological practice of keeping everything poses critical issues. Materials, at times unanalyzed and certainly underutilized, sit in repositories collecting dust while taking space and requiring financial obligations. These...

  • Mortar Analysis for Archaeological Stratigraphy: The Stadt Huys Block and Seven Hanover Square Collections, New York, NY (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Figuereo.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Advancements in materials analysis offer new opportunities for studying architectural materials in archaeological collections. This paper will demonstrate the diagnostic capabilities of mortars recovered from the Stadt Huys Block and Seven Hanover Square excavations in Lower Manhattan in...

  • Oak and Bluestone: Resource Extraction, Agriculture, and Economy in the Catskills (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordon D Loucks.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper evaluates existing data and collections from compliance based archaeological studies located in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Over the course of European settlement, the economy in this region has been based almost entirely in agriculture and resource extraction to...

  • Provenience Versus Richness in Collection Analysis, An Example from Historic Hanna’s Town (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben L. Ford.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Historic Hanna’s Town collection consists of artifacts from an 18th-centruy town in western Pennsylvania excavated both 40 years ago by amateurs and two years ago by closely supervised field schools. The earlier collections often lack precise provenience information but represent a...

  • The Royal Armorer, Visiting Indian Delegations, and Colonoware at the Heyward-Washington House: Tales from a Legacy Collection (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Martha Zierden. Sarah Platt. Nic Butler. Jon Marcoux. Ron Anthony.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Heyward-Washington house is the first house museum in Charleston, South Carolina (opened in 1929) and site of the first large –scale urban archaeological investigation (1974-1977). It is now the largest legacy collection housed at The Charleston Museum. The c.1772 house is at least...

  • A Tale of Two Early Jails: Reconstructing the Archaeological Context at site 8ES1340 in Pensacola, Florida (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan M. Mumford.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. As the cost and space associated with curating large amounts of excavated materials surmount available resources, researchers have justified curating such collections by advocating their research potential and contribution to new archaeological perspectives (Voss 2012; Voss and Kane...