Collections Rescue in Washington , D.C.: “Can we have our garage back?”

Summary

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

“Can we have our garage back?” The person asking this was storing 50 boxes of collections from data recovery at the 1786 Forrest Marbury House in her garage. Compliance investigations in 1986 were not reported because of a legal loophole, and curation was not funded. DC lacked a curation facility so many of our collections were parked with whoever could be convinced to house them, including developers. After 35 years, we have a curation facility and this legacy collection now has a permanent home, but it remains unreported. Locating and rescuing legacy collections requires doing the archaeology of archaeology. Legacy collections that lack technical reports are appealing to researchers and graduate students looking for collections-based data for papers, theses, and dissertations. Most collections in search of authors were professionally excavated with extant field records, and photo catalogs. Collaboration with young researchers is mutually beneficial. They apply current/contemporary analytical frameworks and methods to create new data, approaching questions of class, ethnicity, heritage, gender, and occupation in ways unapproachable in the 1980s-1990s. They learn collections management best practices, and we receive inventoried, analyzed, curation-ready collections; technical reports; and all the data. We showcase several examples herein including some in need of authors.

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): 40277.0