Confronting the Challenge of Analyzing Museum Collections with Limited Archival Data in Southern Brazil

Summary

One of the major challenges in working with museum collections of excavated material is the paucity of information available about the original excavation. What value do these collections have without any context? This paper examines a case study of an archaeological collection from one of the first Spanish Jesuit missions founded in Southern Brazil, housed at the Paranaense Museum, Curitiba, Brazil. The mission, Santo Inacio Mini (1610 – 1631), was the largest in the province and was integral to missionizing efforts among the Tupi-Guarani. Excavated in 1963, the collection includes a variety of ceramic and lithic artefacts that have never been analyzed and little information is available about excavation methodology and provenance. Nevertheless, the collection is an important resource to explore the impact of Spanish missions on Tupi-Guarani communities, and address methodological and theoretical challenges inherent in working with what are essentially contemporary remains of past archaeological studies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Boxed but not forgotten: The significance of collections-driven research in historical archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2017

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 310