Forgotten Finds: Updating Existing Collections for Modern Research

Summary

The existing collections of our nation’s institutions hold great potential for future research and should be subject to modern scientific inquiry. If these collections are not catalogued or sorted properly, they can lie forgotten and virtually inaccessible to scholarly research. The example presented here is of a legacy collection, comprised of artifacts from the Tulare Lake area in Kings County, California. This selection is primarily of lithic tools, which represent ancient California life-ways, with rough dates from 9000 B.C.E. to 1000 C.E. The majority of this collection was "gifted" to the museum, as such the material itself had lost most of its provenance by the time it entered museum collections. This did not diminish the quality of the collection as the stone-tools represent a wide variety of both material and morphological types. Beyond its academic potential this assemblage also maintains cultural significance for the Yokut community. The priority was to offer the most complete classification of the material possible and to generate a rich understanding of the overall collection. These efforts have already produced novel results and stand to highlight the potential benefit for updating existing collections for their use in modern study.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Crisis and Opportunity: Legacy Collections and Archaeological Research in the 21st Century

Keywords

Spatial Coverage