Victorian Values: North American Archaeology at the British Museum during the Nineteenth Century

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The founding collection of the British Museum, given by Hans Sloane in 1752, contained several Archaic and Late Prehistoric stone points from North America, some of the first examples from the continent to be included within early museum collections. Over the following 150 years the collection expanded rapidly fulfilling a need for contemporary, analogous material to inform theories replacing a Biblical explanation for human origins, with those emerging from the evidence exposed in the Somme Valley and Southern England. A large part of the collection serves this purpose in a largely visual fashion, being for the most part lithic artifacts with little detail regarding provenance and cultural background. Several collections, however, have good (for their time) contextual detail: objects and samples extracted from the Mississippi Valley by Squier and Davis and the Chumash objects acquired along the California coast by Freer and Summers. Though some scholarly attention has been paid to the material, by significant workers in their field, overall the collections still have much to offer. The collections will be given an overview, discussed historically and, from the vantage point of the present, discussed relative to the archaeological record as it exists today.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36368.0