Under One Roof: The Physical and Digital Reorganization of the Historic St. Mary's City Archaeological Collections

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The archaeological collections at Historic St. Mary’s City span some 50 years of continuous research resulting in approximately 6.5 million artifacts, thousands of pages of field records, paper catalogues, and related documentation. In 2016 the entire collection was moved from multiple storage locations into one single repository at the museum. Over the past few years, staff in the Research and Collections department have been working toward strategies to rehouse, reorganize, and redocument the collections' materials where needed, revealing the various storage and data taphonomies of our collections. Recently, we have been focusing on digitizing legacy collections related to current projects and increasing accessibility both within the museum and public availability. These projects build on previous work and are centralizing information into a single cloud-based database. Some aspects of these efforts include new digital data standards and policies, condition assessments, storage procedures, and updating data and metadata about artifacts in the collection. This paper will discuss these strategies, their development, and our future goals for increasing accessibility to the collection.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40264.0