Blind Dates and Nervous Anticipation: Adding Temporal Context to Perishable Artifacts in Legacy Collections from eastern Utah

Summary

This is an abstract from the "How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Ephraim P. and Dorothy Hickman Pectol Collection, probably the largest single collection of Fremont-associated perishable artifacts, was donated to the Utah State University Eastern Prehistoric Museum in the Spring of 2017. Most of this collection was amassed from sites along the Fremont River during the early 20th century, near what is now Capitol Reef National Park. Unfortunately, little besides this basic information was known about most of the objects in the collection. The museum embarked on a campaign to provide temporal data on perishable artifacts from this and other collections housed at the museum. Over forty objects were selected and sampled for radiocarbon dating through DirectAMS. While many of the results corroborated cultural or temporal affiliations that were already suspected based on chronological and stylistic typologies, some of the results were much younger or older than expected. This initial project of adding a temporal association to these objects has reaffirmed the need for museums and museum-engaged researchers to assess the hidden research potential within existing collections, particularly through modern analytical methods and other novel approaches.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24374