Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Traditionally, archaeology and bioarchaeology have been defined by excavation. Increasingly archaeologists are setting their “sites” on the storeroom and the archive. Engaging with collections, legacy data, accession forms, and excavation reports aligns with sustainability, open and slow science movements, and decolonial aims. Many also interrogate and respond to the colonial and imperialist histories of collections. Although collections-oriented studies are gaining visibility, few have fully engaged with the notion of curatorial institutions—museums, government repositories, nonprofit agencies, universities, private collections, and databases—as archaeological sites themselves. Yet, collections and archives are not neutral spaces. All have social and material histories shaped by entanglements with other objects, people, politics, events, and nonhuman actors. In turn, these histories shape the questions we ask and the conclusions we draw from them. The storeroom, archive, and database exhibit site formation processes—taphonomies—that also require excavation. Session papers investigate these “storeroom taphonomies.” What new questions or insights emerge when we turn our attention to the materialities of storage facilities and archives? We welcome discussions related to the various institutional settings where these processes occur and consideration of a range of artifacts and materials, such as, but not limited to, paper, bone, and organics alongside glass, metals, and ceramics.

Other Keywords
Historic • Conservation and Curation • Collections • Museums • Bioarchaeology/Skeletal Analysis • and Repatriation • Historical Archaeology • Colonialism • Zooarchaeology • Ethics

Geographic Keywords
North America: Northeast and Midatlantic • United States of America (Country) • North America (Continent) • USA (Country) • Delaware (State / Territory) • Georgia (State / Territory) • Mississippi (State / Territory) • Tennessee (State / Territory) • North Carolina (State / Territory) • Kentucky (State / Territory)

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

  • Documents (14)
Documents
  • Archaeologies of Legacy: Southern Memory and the Archaeological Archive at 87 Church Street, Charleston (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Platt.

    This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 87 Church Street, now known as the Heyward-Washington House, is one of the most extensively excavated sites in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, representing a cross-section of urban life spanning the earliest decades of the eighteenth century to its reimagining as a historic house museum in 1929 on the leading edge...

  • Basement Curation: Adopting an Orphaned Collection from Montserrat (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Clay.

    This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Galways Plantation collection, consisting of 28 boxes of artifacts excavated on Montserrat during the 1980s, was temporarily on loan in the United States when the Soufrière Hills Volcano erupted in July 1995. This catastrophic event led to the creation of an exclusion zone covering two-thirds of the island that...

  • Black Bodies and the Making of Race in Antebellum America (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Aja Lans. Daniel Sunshine.

    This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. University and museum collections containing human remains belonging to members of the African diaspora have recently come under scrutiny and for valid reasons. The curation of the bodies of Black individuals continues to inflict violence and reinforces the notion that Black people are objects, not humans. During the...

  • Dismemberment as Postmortem Disablement: The Disparate Mortuary Sites of the Collected (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Muller.

    This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Acknowledgment of the educational value of pathological conditions in human cadavers prompted scholars of anatomy and anthropology to partition bodily tissues of the dissected among their colleagues. This scientific network of shared body parts, for the purpose of specialized study, segregated the divisible body into...

  • The Making of the 1928 Hurricane Victims 1 and 2: Excavating Identity in an Unknowable Legacy Collection (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith Ellis.

    This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In traditional bioarchaeological practice, the first scientific identities fixed to skeletal remains are the labels given to them when they are excavated. From there, the basic information about the remains is built from those first identifying features associated with the site. But what happens if the remains are...

  • The Plastic Bag Paradox: Taphonomy and Complicity in the Archaeological Archive (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Pamela Geller.

    This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Plastics present a paradox for archaeology. They are ubiquitous and inevitable, taking myriad forms—bags for artifacts, tarps for units, containers for storage, etc.—in excavation and archival settings. Their utilitarian value is predicated on the presumption of durability and stability. But for how long and in what...

  • A Queer Afterlife: Re-excavating the Halcyon House Collection (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Lupu.

    This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A rumored tie to LGBTQ history has drawn people to the Halcyon House archaeological collection across several decades. In this talk, I draw on Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer phenomenology that conceptualizes queerness as an “orientation” toward certain objects and bodies. What does it mean to seek resonance in the past...

  • Reassembling an Assemblage to Examine the Origins of Race-Based Enslavement at Flowerdew Hundred Plantation (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Bollwerk. Jillian Galle. Fraser Neiman.

    This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Flowerdew Hundred, a 1,000-acre plantation tract located on the south side of the James River in Virginia, was the focus of decades of excavations by the College of William and Mary and University of California, Berkeley. Three Flowerdew sites are among the earliest seventeenth-century settlements occupied by enslaved...

  • Reevaluating Bone Artifact Collections and Their Histories at the Museum of Northern Arizona (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Magen Hodapp. Chrissina Burke.

    This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal bones and the artifacts manufactured from them have long existed in conflicting archaeological and museum classification systems. Curating institutions once classified them as non-artifactual, or as ecofacts, and only in more recent years have worked animal bones been categorized as artifacts. Regardless of these...

  • “A Sense of Stewardship”: Assessing the Archives of Alexandria Archaeology (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Tatiana Niculescu. Eleanor Breen.

    This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1961, the city of Alexandria, Virginia financed one of the first municipally funded archaeological projects in the country, laying the groundwork for today’s Alexandria Archaeology which curates three million artifacts from over 250 sites. Since the 1960s, the program has witnessed urban renewal, the birth of the CRM...

  • Tails from the Animal Storerooms: Case Studies on the Uses and Limitations of Natural History Collections Using Multiproxy Approaches (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristine Richter. Ryan Kennedy. Jess Miller-Camp.

    This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Natural history collections (including zooarchaeological collections) provide essential information for archaeologists. They are primarily used in identifying bones and other hard tissues, and they provide references for biomolecular and isotopic studies. Biomolecular data from these collections are increasingly the...

  • Taphonomy and the Death Course: Materializing Value in an Anatomical Collection (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Alanna Warner-Smith.

    This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Huntington Anatomical Collection, part of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History biological anthropology collections, is comprised of just over 3,000 individuals, about 50% of whom were foreign-born immigrants. They died in New York City public institutions between 1893 and 1921 and were...

  • Under One Roof: The Physical and Digital Reorganization of the Historic St. Mary's City Archaeological Collections (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenn Ogborne. Erin Crawford.

    This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological collections at Historic St. Mary’s City span some 50 years of continuous research resulting in approximately 6.5 million artifacts, thousands of pages of field records, paper catalogues, and related documentation. In 2016 the entire collection was moved from multiple storage locations into one single...

  • Why So Blue? The Great Island Tavern and Its Legacy (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Hayley Malloy. Alicia Paresi.

    This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological collections and their perpetual care allow archaeologists an opportunity to right wrongs and revisit interpretations of site formation and identity. Looking at past methodologies through our twenty-first-century professional standards allows for a more objective review of both field and post-field...