Between a Rock and a Hard Spot: Museum Collections and Mesoamerican Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The changing relationship of US art and natural history museums and other collections-holding institutions and the field of archaeology as anthropology is examined in this presentation. We assess the past 100+ years’ amassing of archaeological objects as cultural curios, aesthetic objects, and published or unpublished assemblages (both institutional and private). The paper demonstrates the value of analyzing these mostly unprovenienced (or excavation-orphaned) collections using objective analytical approaches in concert with provenienced objects and archaeological data. The paper concludes with a discussion of the changing collections practices of US art museums and how (or how not) outside pressures motivated these changes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36120.0