Digging Out: Finding Creative Solutions to Four Decades of CRM Collections

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Navigating Ethical and Legal Quandaries in Modern Archaeological Curation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

When Wetland Studies and Solutions Inc. purchased Thunderbird Archaeology in 2004, they found themselves responsible for some 800 boxes of artifacts from more than four decades of CRM projects. The story isn’t an uncommon one . . . boxes of CRM projects sitting in basements, sheds, storage units, or warehouses in various states of curation; however, WSSI tackled this responsibility head-on. Challenges were encountered every step of the way, from documenting exactly what we had and the condition of those collections, to determining who owned them and how we could legally transfer them to a curation repository. Just when we had resolved these issues, a recession came along that created a whole new set of legal issues involving companies going out of business and brought questions regarding property ownership. Faced with legal, ethical, and financial challenges, we worked to find creative solutions to finally placing these collections in permanent curation repositories.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Navigating Ethical and Legal Quandaries in Modern Archaeological Curation   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33308