Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)
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 "Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
In the formative years of professional archaeology in the United States, Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (PMAE) conducted many archaeology expeditions throughout the world, not least of which were those among Ohio’s “mound builders.” In Ohio, these were most often hasty and sloppy undertakings occurring in the wake of forced removals and land grabs in the Old Northwest Territory. The Turpin site is one such case where several acres were “excavated” over a few months in one winter season by four local laborers and a medical doctor under the direction of Frederic Ward Putnam, one of the first PMAE directors and “father” of American archaeology. Instead of only lamenting the dramatic loss and inadequacy of the PMAE collection, this session compares work I have led at the site over last several years that has focused on a systematic effort to remedy these shortcomings through additional fieldwork and one that seeks to be collaborative with tribal descendants and local communities.
Other Keywords
Collections •
Museums •
Mississippian •
and Repatriation •
Lithic Analysis •
Chronology •
Experimental Archaeology •
Fort Ancient •
Ceramic Analysis •
Historic
Geographic Keywords
United States of America (Country) •
Missouri (State / Territory) •
Kentucky (State / Territory) •
Illinois (State / Territory) •
Wisconsin (State / Territory) •
Indiana (State / Territory) •
Michigan (State / Territory) •
Nebraska (State / Territory) •
Kansas (State / Territory) •
Iowa (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-6 of 6)
- Documents (6)
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“General Diggings”: Where Did Harvard Dig? Determining the Actual Layout of the Turpin Site (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the span of a few winter months in the mid-1880s, Harvard University conducted excavations on the property of Philip Turpin in Hamilton County, Ohio. Under the direction of Charles Metz, a local physician, a small team excavated areas throughout the...
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Picking Up the Pieces of Harvard’s Colonialist Archaeology: The Turpin Site in Social, Historical, and Archaeological Context (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As with many archaeological sites, the Turpin site has factored into various social, historical, and archaeological narratives ranging from the good to the bad and ugly. Here we begin by situating Harvard’s archaeology project at Turpin within the social...
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Seeing is Believing: Re-creating the Past at Turpin with Virtual Reality (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists are often good at communicating with each other, but not usually at conveying our findings to wider audiences. This seems particularly true in the US Midwest, where visibility of the remains of ancient sites is low, in contrast to places like...
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The Turpin Project: A Tribal Perspective (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The relationship between American Indian tribes and American archaeology—both its practice and its practitioners—has always been complicated and is still often fraught with a lack of consonance. Although the engagement of tribes as consulting parties in...
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What’s the Point? Contextualizing the Significance of the Turpin Lithic Assemblage (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A long-standing point of contention has been the degree of continuity and change between the Middle Woodland (ending AD 500) and Fort Ancient periods (beginning about AD 1000). The intermediate Late Woodland period has become a placeholder but is clearly of...
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Whole Pots and Harvard Drops: Understanding the Pottery from Turpin (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many early professional archaeological investigations in the Ohio River Valley resulted in legacy collections lacking in a variety of ways. The Turpin site, excavated by Harvard University in the late nineteenth century, is an early Fort Ancient village...