Four Down, 6,000 to Go: Processing and Researching the (not) St. Joseph’s Cemetery Site Legacy Collection

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Historical Archaeologies of the American Southwest, 1800 to Today" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological legacy collections found in museums and repositories across the nation continue to present challenging and intriguing research opportunities. Basic processing of artifacts and field notes within these older collections can itself feel like an excavation and the slow process of addressing an institution’s backlog can be daunting. The University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology’s (MMA) backlog remains in over 6,000 boxes and although thousands have been processed, the smaller historic collections are often given a backseat to larger prehistoric collections. This case study looks at a recently processed historical archaeological collection, LA 49791, housed at MMA in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In a combined effort by staff, graduate students, and volunteers, this holistic study combines artifact analysis and archival research, in concert with bioarchaeological techniques to reclaim contextual integrity for eleven nineteenth century burials and their artifacts. While the sample is small, the individuals buried at this cemetery can give biohistorical insight into others who might remain interred there as well as highlight the research potential that hides within legacy collections.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Historical Archaeologies of the American Southwest, 1800 to Today   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24520