Introduction:

Archaeologists seek to improve our understanding of the past by studying, preserving, protecting, and sharing nonreplaceable archaeological resources. Archaeological collections hold information that can assist these aims as long as they are properly cared for, identified, and accessible. One of the most serious barriers is the lack of large-scale coordinated efforts to make archaeological collections findable and accessible. This article suggests that developing and implementing the use of a standardized set of attributes regarding collections provides solutions and strategies to find collections. These attributes can connect and standardize existing archaeological collections from a variety of sources (federal and state agencies, CRM firms, Indigenous and descendant communities, and academic departments), serving the profession in multiple ways. Most critically, the baseline data can be synthesized to inform and direct priorities for future fieldwork, thereby decreasing redundancy in archaeological collections and improving curation efforts nationwide. Such efforts would also provide a resource to students and researchers looking to understand and interpret the past at multiple scales by encouraging more collections-based research and less archaeological site destruction. Access for descendant communities will also be improved with information about their cultural heritage. This, in turn, encourages transparency and collaboration between those communities and archaeologists.

Section: The Value Of Our Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making Archaeological Collections More Findable and Accessible through Increased Coordination

Neller,

Heckman,

Bollwerk

et al. 2024

“…They are also meaningful to nonacademic communities, particularly descendants (Heath et al 2019;Neller 2004). Archaeologists have an ethical obligation to make data available to interested publics when possible (Allen et al 2019;Childs 2004; Society for American Archaeology 1996). To ethically interpret archaeological data that may impact a descendant community, archaeologists should follow the CARE principles.…”

Section: Recommendations For Scholars Facing Similar Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although these benefits should not be written off, I question where this paradigm shift will leave the many thousands of sites that were excavated before such technology was available. These sites are preserved through collections of artifacts and hard copies of accompanying records (Allen et al 2019;Childs 2004;MacFarland and Vokes 2016). Legacy data (data from past research, including excavation notes, site reports, and results from previous analyses) can be difficult to use, requiring considerable preprocessing and cleaning (McManamon et al 2017;Sobotkova 2018).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Creating a Software Methodology to Analyze and Preserve Archaeological Legacy Data

Fletcher

2023

Software now allows archaeologists to document excavations in more detail than ever before through rich, born-digital datasets. In comparison, paper documentation of past excavations (a valuable corpus of legacy data) is prohibitively difficult to work with. This pilot study explores creating custom software to digitize paper field notes from the 1970s excavations of the Gulkana site into machine-readable text and maps to be compatible with born-digital data from subsequent excavations in the 1990s. This site, located in Alaska's Copper River Basin, is important to archaeological understanding of metalworking innovation by precontact Northern Dene people, but is underrepresented in the literature because no comprehensive map of the site exists. The process and results of digitizing this corpus are presented in hopes of aiding similar efforts by other researchers.

“…Almost all university archaeologists have some sort of field methods textbook on their shelves, and their libraries likely subscribe to the Journal of Field Archaeology . It is easy to find field methods texts going back more than 70 years, yet how many of those archaeologists also have Curating Archaeological Collections: From the Field to the Repository (Sullivan and Childs 2003), Using and Curating Archaeological Collections (Childs and Warner 2019), or New Life for Archaeological Collections (Allen and Ford 2019) on their shelves?…”

Section: The Reality: Kicking the Proverbial Can As Standard Operatin...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“Lies My Teacher Told Me”

Warner,

Rivers Cofield

2023

A major problem in collections management is the lack of training about collections in all facets of archaeology. Ignorance about both ethical obligations and practical steps associated with collections is arguably the leading contributor to the ongoing curation crisis. This work summarizes shortcomings in collections training in academia and in cultural resource management, and it proceeds to identify some steps that can be taken to provide training for students and professional archaeologists. The overriding argument is that more training in all aspects of collections is absolutely essential to addressing and beginning to mitigate the overwhelming problems the discipline faces in caring for archaeological collections.