A Box Labeled “Mystery. Misc. Headaches”: Inherited Problems in Collections Management

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The term “curation crisis” describes the challenges facing collections care on a large scale: issues of limited space, staff, and funding and of meeting federal curation standards. Yet, beyond these big picture problems, some of the greatest challenges of managing archaeological collections are the smaller collections problems one inherits from previous collections managers, past archaeologists, short-term volunteers and interns, and colleagues. These problems can take the form of partially finished projects, a box of found-in-collections items simply labeled “mysteries,” artifacts pulled for analysis, loans, or exhibits that were never returned to their boxes, or a loss of institutional memory, among myriad other to-do list items that were never completed. This paper presents a selection of inherited collections problems, explores their causes, and offers strategies for dealing with these problems and reducing the scale, if not the quantity, of problems our successors in collections management will inevitably inherit.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39988.0