Containing Archaeology: Categorization, Hidden Labor, and the Social Lives of Archaeological Ephemera

Summary

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

In 1940, textile fragments and botanical specimens were packed into matchboxes from cave sites in Coahuila, Mexico during Walter Taylor’s archaeological excavation. By the 1990s the specimens were accessioned into the Smithsonian, and the archaeological notes archived, yet the matchboxes themselves never received any record. Instead, collections managers taken by the artwork and the novelty of the containers saved them as ephemera. This project treats these matchboxes as artifacts of archaeological work, and indeed as entities that were influenced by and capable of making practices of archaeological science. By tracing the labor regimes they passed through, the specimens they once contained, and the hands that used them in a multitude of ways, this project uses the matchboxes’ microhistories to ask questions about how archaeological narratives get constructed, in what conditions, and by whom.

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): 37701.0