Wonderful Things: Using Legacy Archaeological Collections for Research

Summary

How does one go about using legacy archaeological collections – or any archaeological collection, for that matter – for research? The prospect can be daunting, especially if you are staring down dozens of dusty boxes on shelves. This paper offers direction for studying even the most untamed collection by understanding it as a type of secondary data – lessons learned while working with legacy collections from the Potomac and Rappahannock river valleys in Maryland and Virginia. Secondary data, a term that crosses disciplines, is, in the broadest sense, data collected by someone else and used to address new or different questions than those originally posed. Defining research questions, becoming familiar with a collection, creating checklists, reconstructing provenience, developing methods for sorting, coding, and re-coding collections data, and applying appropriate quantitative techniques are steps we identified and found useful for the study of older collections, some generated nearly 80 years ago.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20225