Navigating Ethical and Legal Quandaries in Modern Archaeological Curation

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.