Archaeology in and with Museums: A Case Study from Honduras

Summary

Archaeology in the US is undergoing a series of transformations, emphasizing community engaged scholarship, new research questions of contemporary relevance dealing with such things as resilience, social memory, and production of historical identity, and a shift towards non-invasive methods and intensive analyses of smaller samples from more limited excavations. Yet the normative vision of archaeological research still is original excavation of a site selected purposively to answer a question, sampled by predetermined strategies. Research with previously collected materials, especially in older museum collections, is not often presented as potentially a normative option for theses and dissertations. My own research encompasses settlement survey, excavation, and materials analyses under the normative model of archaeological research, as well as use of curated collections. In this presentation, I will describe highly productive research on Honduran archaeology that the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian have made possible, emphasizing the kinds of questions that the museum collection allows me to address that were not feasible without its holdings. I explain several strategies used in this research to provide contexts for interpretation, emphasizing the interplay between smaller, tightly controlled excavated samples and the larger collections in the museum.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20006