The Turpin Project: A Tribal Perspective

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The relationship between American Indian tribes and American archaeology—both its practice and its practitioners—has always been complicated and is still often fraught with a lack of consonance. Although the engagement of tribes as consulting parties in federally mandated (Section 106) projects has slowly increased over the last nearly half century, such consultative engagement (let alone participation) typically is less common and less robust when it comes to archaeological research projects. We discuss here how the Turpin Project has, by contrast, provided a unique opportunity for the Miami Tribe to engage with archaeological research. The importance of our relationship with the project results, in part, because some of our research interests overlap with the project’s, given the Miamis’ early historical presence in this late precontact site’s vicinity. Still more important to the Tribe, however, is the opportunity the Turpin Project has provided for us to lay the groundwork for the reburial of remains exhumed from the site in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. While such a focus might run directly counter to many archaeological research programs, the Turpin Project has itself focused on reconnecting descendant communities to the site and on furthering repatriation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39529.0