Basket Pedagogies and Other Object Lessons

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

How can we learn from an object? How is that different from learning about an object? In a class project, I asked students to undo institutionalized silences and challenge dominant narratives with museum objects that appear to be mute. We studied three O'Odham baskets housed at the Syracuse University Art Museum that have scant associated provenience and provenance. Like many museum objects, they have spent much of their tenure in storage, propped up with tissue and foam and the ideals of Western heritage conservation. But these conditions, while good for the longevity of the fragile fibers, hasten the erosion of the object as a vibrant source of knowledge. I asked students to seriously consider what lessons the baskets held, and for whom. I challenged students to resituate the baskets as nodes in a larger network of relationships, yet to be acknowledged. The baskets defied student attempts to access the lessons they thought they were entitled to. Instead, lessons reached students according to what they were ready to take responsibility for. They offered the students tangible clues about socio-ecological networks of gatherers, willows, and rivers; and settler colonial interruptions, and wove these narratives together in ways that surprised us all.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41562.0