This Is the Way: Moving Toward Best Practices in Collection and Data Submission to Archaeological Repositories

Summary

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

Archaeological repositories curate artifacts and associated documentation for state, tribal and federal agencies. In carrying out their legally mandated duties, each repository faces unique challenges, but common to all is the well-documented, multifaceted national curation crisis. The Arizona State Museum (ASM) is no exception, with personnel working to preserve the physical integrity and information potential of collections for multiple stakeholders with limited space and financial resources. National and local focus on the crisis has illuminated various avenues for improvement in archaeological and museological practice, but there is still work to be done to characterize the problems and identify solutions. This paper contributes to the discussion, focusing on ways that collections come to designated repositories, such as ASM, from academic and cultural resources management excavations and the ways each type of project contributes to the crisis in Arizona. Evaluating the scope, incoming condition, effort required to prepare each type of collection for curation, and resources allocated for maintenance of each offers a chance to reflect on internal practice from the field to the repository, and keeping stakeholders needs in mind, identify cost-effective ways in which collection depositors can help prepare archaeological resources for collections management and future collaborative synthetic research needs.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36704.0