Combating the Curation Crisis Through Dissertation Research: An Argument for Disciplinary Valorization and Financial Support of Legacy Collection Rehabilitation

Summary

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

Over the past 60-plus years, the adoption of more rigorous cultural heritage preservation laws in the U.S. and abroad coupled with a rapid expansion of active practicing archaeologists have led to ever-increasing volumes of archaeological collections. These enormous stores of artifacts and documentation have been acknowledged since the early-1980s as constituting a "curation crisis," in which there are more collections to be curated than space to keep them or time, resources, and expertise to analyze them. To combat this crisis, archaeologists have advocated for investing in a variety of both analog and digital infrastructures that will allow for both greater access to curated collections and increased reuse of such collections to produce new interpretations. Due in part to changes in archaeological data collection, management, and curation practices, however, many curated collections require serious rehabilitation to be accessible and analyzable. As graduate students ourselves, we focus on the role graduate students can play in combating the "curation crisis" in dissertation research. Drawing from our own work, we argue for the importance of curated collections in dissertation research as not only an inexpensive and non-destructive form of data, but also as an urgent disciplinary and funding priority.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24160