Navigating Ethical and Legal Quandaries in Modern Archaeological Curation
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Navigating Ethical and Legal Quandaries in Modern Archaeological Curation" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
Archaeological repositories and museums contend with legal and ethical concerns on a daily basis. While the laws and regulations surrounding archaeology have been significantly modified over the past few decades, those applying to archaeological curation facilities, museums, and repositories have remained largely stagnant and impractically vague. Each facility is attempting to deal with concerns such as accepting unprovenienced collections, valuing donated collections for tax write-offs, and property/intellectual property issues concerning digitization and open-access projects, to name a few. We are finding that while there are some great resources out there and some laws that have been more recently created or amended, in the end we are mostly all operating by means of agreed consensus without recourse to solid, modern regulations or laws. This symposium creates a forum for archaeological curators to discuss (with discretion) some of the specific instances that they have faced recently, how they attempted to resolve them, the challenges they encountered, and what, if any, resolution was found. As a result of this forum, we hope to identify some key common issues that we are facing nationwide, and help jump-start the impetus to update or develop much-needed nationwide standards and regulations.
Other Keywords
Conservation and Curation •
Museums, Collections, and Repatriation •
Cultural Resource Management •
Historic •
Cultural Resources and Heritage Management •
Laws •
Cultural Heritage and Preservation •
Colonial, Indigenous
Geographic Keywords
United States of America (Country) •
North America (Continent) •
North America: Northeast and Midatlantic •
North America •
United Mexican States (Country) •
Department of Martinique (Country) •
Republic of El Salvador (Country) •
Department of Guadeloupe (Country) •
Cayman Islands (Country) •
Antigua and Barbuda (Country)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-9 of 9)
- Documents (9)
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Building the Middle-Ground Archive: A Resource for Navigating Burial Laws, Regulations, and Guidance (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. In early 2017 a human skull was left outside the front door of the Blackwater Draw Museum in Portales, New Mexico. No one saw it arrive; it was simply there when the museum opened that morning. Facilities that curate or display archaeological materials encounter situations such as this more frequently than one...
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Curating Archaeological Collections in the Private Small Liberal Arts Context (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. This paper considers archaeological curation in a private, small liberal arts college (SLAC) context. Many SLACs have archaeological collections acquired through donation from alumni or local residents, occasionally through purchase or orphaning, and increasingly through student and faculty research on and off...
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Digging Out: Finding Creative Solutions to Four Decades of CRM Collections (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. When Wetland Studies and Solutions Inc. purchased Thunderbird Archaeology in 2004, they found themselves responsible for some 800 boxes of artifacts from more than four decades of CRM projects. The story isn’t an uncommon one . . . boxes of CRM projects sitting in basements, sheds, storage units, or warehouses in...
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Donations and Transfers: Recent Challenges at One State Repository (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. The care and preservation of cultural materials is viewed by the public as a vital role of the museum. Consciously or not, museums are seen as “society’s attic,” a high-quality, sophisticated storage space that contains valuable and irreplaceable objects while remaining infinitely expandable. In reality, space is...
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Donations, Appraisals, and Tax Write-Offs: Trying to Keep Collections Off of the Antiquities Market (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Every year, museums, repositories, archives, and campuses receive requests by private citizens to accept donations of artifacts and archives. Putting aside some of the difficulties that can arise in confirming the provenience and the legality of non-research collections, some donors request that certain conditions...
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The Good, the Bad, and the Not So Great: Archaeological Curation at the New Jersey State Museum (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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,...
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Navigating Archaeological Research and Collections at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Since 1947, the National Park Service and its collaborators have excavated at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, a nineteenth-century fur-trade and U.S. Army colonial site in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Museum collections are dominated by archaeological collections from American Indian and...
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A New Fee Structure to Ensure Repository and Archive Sustainability (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. For many decades, the Arizona State Museum (ASM) used a flat-rate curation model that proved unsustainable. It did not cover the costs of reviewing incoming materials for compliance with the Arizona Antiquities Act (AAA), preparing submissions for curation, or care in perpetuity. Furthermore, inadequate funding...
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Warehousing the Past: Are We Doing the Right Thing? (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. The cultural resource management (CRM) industry, emerging from the passage of landmark national and subsequent state-level legislation, is arguably one of the largest generators of archaeological collections in North America. Project-specific deadlines, budgetary constraints, variations in state agency guidelines,...