Context-Free Archaeology: Private Collections, Data Quality Assessment, and Achieving Meaningful Research at Heavily Looted Sheltered Sites—A Case Study from West Texas

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

There is a long history of engaged amateurs providing the professional community with productive field efforts and artifact collections and of equal length is the controversy surrounding this work. The controversy, from the perspective of this talk, focuses on the issue of artifact context and the gap between the professional and amateur communities’ stances on the issue. In spite of this, the importance of private collections and amateur involvement as valuable sources of knowledge about the past seems to have gained more attention with the development of interest groups like the Archaeologist-Artifact Collector Collaboration Interest Group (ACCIG) by the Society of American Archaeologists and the increasing recognition of the topic in more professional publications. The example I present from Spirit Eye Cave is typical of research with private collections: one side places the importance on the recovered artifacts, the other laments the loss of context while both groups acknowledge the importance of the site to the field of archaeology. However, in the case of Spirit Eye Cave, I de-emphasized the importance of context with the collectors and worked from a position of mutual respect. The results of this approach are the subject of this talk.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24905