Provenience Versus Richness in Collection Analysis, An Example from Historic Hanna’s Town

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Historic Hanna’s Town collection consists of artifacts from an 18th-centruy town in western Pennsylvania excavated both 40 years ago by amateurs and two years ago by closely supervised field schools. The earlier collections often lack precise provenience information but represent a richness and diversity of artifacts not found in more recent excavations. This situation is common at other sites that were heavily excavated before modern techniques were adopted, leaving the old collection as the best source for new information on the site. This paper will discuss the ways in which Indiana University of Pennsylvania faculty and students have attempted to integrate the various scales of provenience within the Hanna’s Town collection, and how targeted modern excavations have been used to bring clarity to earlier records.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 586