An Exploration Into a New Method of Skeletal Inventory in a Curatorial Setting

Summary

The Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains has been the standard for inventorying skeletal collections around the country, as well as most recently adopted by the Autry National Center of the American West. In 2011, a new digital method of inventory was developed by the Smithsonian Institution, called Osteoware. Osteoware is intended to be a common set of core observations between different researchers and incorporates The Standards. This project looks over the merits and drawbacks of using each methods and how Osteoware compares with The Standards as a replacement for inventorying curatorial collections. It also compares the usefulness of these methods in relation to the collections and curation departments, since each of these departments has different needs, as well as with the bigger question of whether Osteoware is useful institutionally wide or is it specialized to osteologists and archaeologists. This exploration will utilize legacy collections from the American Southwest. The collection at the Autry National Center of the American West has been untouched, and with a new team of osteologists we will utilize both methods and see which is more beneficial.

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Cite this Record

An Exploration Into a New Method of Skeletal Inventory in a Curatorial Setting. Margarita Villarreal, Lindsay Jacoby, Karimah Richardson. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 396430)

Spatial Coverage

min long: -115.532; min lat: 30.676 ; max long: -102.349; max lat: 42.033 ;