Whole Pots and Harvard Drops: Understanding the Pottery from Turpin

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.

Many early professional archaeological investigations in the Ohio River Valley resulted in legacy collections lacking in a variety of ways. The Turpin site, excavated by Harvard University in the late nineteenth century, is an early Fort Ancient village located along the Little Miami River near the confluence with the Ohio River. This site is important because it represents one of the very earliest Fort Ancient occupations in the region. Today it is the locus of our ongoing project striving to work to provide data to better utilize such poor collections. Here we focus on one material class in the assemblage—pottery—through the lenses of both intrasite variation and differences between previous and current excavation practices at the site. We do so by focusing on differences in temper types, surface treatments, neck and rim decorations, and vessel morphology from the site within the context of how excavation strategies have shifted from the 19th century practices to the methods currently being used in our ongoing excavations at the site.

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): 39042.0