No Context: Can We Achieve Meaningful Research with Unprovenienced Legacy Collections?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Many Voices in the Repository: Community-Based Collections Work" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Engaged amateurs, or Responsive and Responsible Stewards (RRS), are the drivers behind some of the discipline's most influential field efforts and consequential material collections. There are numerous examples of RRS collaboration with the professional community, and we often use their involvement as a valuable source of knowledge about the past. However, this often includes collaborative fieldwork where professional communities recover or verify locational information about recovered materials. Collected or orphaned materials without clear locational information are denigrated. As a discipline, we tend to value locational data more than recovered artifacts, and the loss of a verifiable context by professionals has left important collections unanalyzed. Can we build methods to incorporate unprovenienced legacy collections into more extensive analyses? This talk will include several examples of context-free archaeology and the methods associated with building spatial information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Many Voices in the Repository: Community-Based Collections Work

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 54020