Archaeological Curation and the Research Value of Archaeological Collections

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the curatorial and collections management-related efforts undertaken to establish the research value of an “old” archaeological collection housed in a museum in California for over one hundred years. The archaeological collection assessed is associated with one of the most important archaeological sites in the region, the Ellis Landing shell mound, a site excavated in 1906 by one of North America's leading archaeologists. First, after core issues in archaeological curation are examined, basic features of the site and its excavation are outlined. Next, the process of curating, reanalyzing, and establishing the research potential of the collection is described, recent archaeological analyses of the curated collection are presented, and the implications of this work for the museum profession and the research community are explored. Finally, to best manage these “old” archaeology collections, it is concluded that it is critical to recognize how much their research value has changed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.