Good morning all,
Myself and my colleague Alanna Warner-Smith (Postdoctoral Fellow, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History) are organizing a session for this coming year’s Society for American Archaeology conference in New Orleans. The session will focus on the “taphonomies” of the storeroom and collections repository. I have included the abstract below.
We welcome abstracts for inclusion in the session that address these concerns regarding the site formation processes of collections, museums, repositories, and other curatorial institutions. If you are interested in participating, please send an abstract (or idea for an abstract) by August 31st for consideration.
We hope you will join us!
All the best,
Sarah Platt
Assistant Professor, College of Charleston
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Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive
Traditionally, archaeology and bioarchaeology have been defined by excavation. Increasingly archaeologists are setting their “sites” on the storeroom and the archive. Engaging with collections, legacy data, accession forms, and excavation reports aligns with sustainability, open and slow science movements, and decolonial aims. Many also interrogate and respond to the colonial and imperialist histories of collections.
Although collections-oriented studies are gaining visibility, few have fully engaged with the notion of curatorial institutions--museums, government repositories, nonprofit agencies, universities, private collections, and databases--as archaeological sites themselves. Yet, collections and archives are not neutral spaces. All have social and material histories shaped by entanglements with other objects, people, politics, events, and non-human actors. In turn, these histories shape the questions we ask and the conclusions we draw from them. The storeroom, archive, and database exhibit site formation processes--taphonomies--that also require excavation.
The session organizers invite papers investigating “storeroom taphonomies.” What new questions or insights emerge when we turn our attention to the materialities of storage facilities and archives? We welcome discussions related to the wide variety of institutional settings where these processes occur and consideration of a range of artifacts and materials, such as, but not limited to, paper, bone, and organics alongside glass, metals, and ceramics.
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