In the United States, deaccessioning is a poorly understood collections management tool. Archaeologists often view deaccessioning with what Robert Sonderman called “primal fear,” and this fear has caused them to overlook the opportunities that deaccessioned artifacts and collections may provide in the area of public archaeology education. Although deaccessioning without checks and balances can be problematic, when done properly and ethically, it offers previously untapped resources to the creation of educational programming, such as teaching trunk programs. This article discusses the process of deaccessioning and suggests that deaccessioned artifacts may be useful as content for teaching trunk programs. We discuss a case study from our own institution, where we implemented a trunk program in 2016 that was largely stocked with material from a deaccession we had performed the previous year. We also offer suggestions for anyone wishing to implement a similar program.
Although we, as archaeologists, recognize the value in teaching nonprofessionals about our discipline and the knowledge it generates about the human condition, there are few of these specialists compared to the number of archaeologists practicing today. In this introductory article to the special section titled “Touching the Past to Learn the Past,” we suggest that, because of our unique training as anthropologists and archaeologists, each of us has the potential to contribute to public archaeology education. By remembering our archaeological theory, such as social memory, we can use the artifacts we engage with on a daily basis to bridge the disconnect between what the public hopes to gain from our interactions and what we want to teach them. In this article, we outline our perspective and present an overview of the other three articles in this section that apply this approach in their educational endeavors.
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