Exploring Collaborative Curation of North American Human Remains

Summary

In 2016, The Field Museum was awarded a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The overall mission of this project is to "research, explore, develop, and implement thoughtful, practical, and forward-thinking practices for the ethical care of human remains." The project is working to bring together stakeholders from collections-holding institutions, scientific research institutions, and Native American and First Nations communities to move beyond conversations of challenges imbedded within institutional collections of human remains by working together to establish shared protocols and principles involving these remains. This poster introduces the IMLS-funded collaborative project currently underway at The Field Museum and particularly focuses on the bioarchaeological and osteological work that is being conducted by the museum’s newly hired bioarchaeologist and 2017 interns. The poster highlights a brief history of the project, and reviews the successes and difficulties of the developing osteological inventory process for these Native North American human remains, including ethical digital curation of human remains data, individuation of remains within commingled collections, rehousing individuals in conservation-approved materials, and accomplishing accurate osteological inventories of mummified individuals.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21293