Ideas, Ethical Ideals, and Museum Practice in North American Archaeological Collections

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Ideas, Ethical Ideals, and Museum Practice in North American Archaeological Collections" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The concepts of “collecting” and “collections” are integral both to museums and to archaeological practice, and North American museums and repositories curate an immense quantity and variety of archaeological material. The curation of collections and the use of collections in research, both envisioned as preservation of the archaeological record, are enshrined in the SAA’s “Principles of Archaeological Ethics.” At the same time and in tension with this ethical ideal, archaeology has a widely acknowledged “curation crisis” that encompasses shortages of space, funding, and labor. Moreover, museums and the wider discipline of archaeology struggle to develop practices that address the colonial legacies that are embodied in archaeological collections. This session will seek explore the ideas and ideals—tacit or explicit—that underlie archaeological collections in North American museums and repositories, how the reality of collections and curation practice articulates with those ideas, and how understanding these ideas can help shape our approaches to the materials in our care and the collections we accept in the future.