Finder-Collectors: Untapped Potential for Collaborative Engaged Scholarship

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Avocationals including metal detectorists can be defined as finder-collectors. This includes people who keep collections, including objects they have themselves found, but also possibly objects that they have acquired through purchasing, swapping, gifting, or by other means. This category expressly does not include people who loot but does include responsible and responsive stewards who currently, or in the future, have the potential to follow best practices for archaeological object conservation and documentation. In this paper, we discuss the results of object interviews, an ethnographic method where the finder-collectors talk about a set of specifically chosen objects while engaging with them during the interview. According to our interviews carried out in Flanders (Belgium) and Norway, most collected objects have a story and, to the finder-collectors, the objects often possess an emotional and mnemonic character—while they also talk to social situations, concerns about the fulfillment of research potential, and many other aspects, some of which are more surprising to us as archaeologists than others. As well as describing our research approaches and results so far, we discuss the possibilities for the future and explain why working with and researching finder-collectors remains a subfield with untapped potential.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Collaborative and Community Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35757.0