USACE National Regionalization Effort: Recovering the Bygone Collections

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: The Importance and Usefulness of Exploring Old or Forgotten Collections" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Existing collections have long been the forgotten byproducts of archaeological research. Federal collections were generally analyzed and then delivered to repositories for long-term curation, where they remained, overlooked, “in perpetuity”. For decades, curation-minded archaeologists have called for change, and while recent years have seen encouraging progress, there is still a great deal to be done. In acknowledgement of this, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Mandatory Center of Expertise for the Curation and Management of Archaeological Collections (MCX CMAC) has pioneered a program to regionalize USACE collections to better facilitate access to approved researchers and tribes, and ensure their continued care. As a result of the National Regionalization Effort, USACE collections are being coalesced into federally compliant facilities, rehabilitated, and cataloged, thus improving their research accessibility and potential. This paper introduces the session and the state of the field, then discusses regionalization and its contribution to collections-based research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: The Importance and Usefulness of Exploring Old or Forgotten Collections   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology