Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)

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.