Escaping Aesthetics, Embracing Storytelling: How Indigenous Artifacts in University Museums Can Remediate Problems in the AP History Curriculum

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 2022, 34.6% of US high schoolers took an AP test, US History being among the most popular subjects. Yet, despite heightened sensitivity toward indigenous cultures and their histories, the AP Historical curriculum still displays shortcomings in this regard. Moreover, in college, many students encounter indigenous cultures through one discipline only: Art History. Within this discipline, introductory courses often treat artifacts as aesthetic objects whose stylistic contents merit study even when original context, use, and provenance are unknown. For the unprepared student, this approach isolates the culture in the past: it is “over.” Yet, those stylistic contents only illuminate brief, temporal fragments of larger, longer stories. In effectively halting museum study and thus the aestheticizing approach to objects as the introduction to Native American cultures, the COVID-19 pandemic offered an escape from aesthetics by forcing educators to consider how indigenous artifacts tell multiple stories, stories of past, present, and future. In fact, the same museum artifacts can fill important learning gaps inherited from the AP curriculum if educators center story rather than style. This paper uses an Alaskan harpoon socket at the Princeton University Art Museum to demonstrate how actively de-aestheticizing research assignments can generate productive learning outcomes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53566