Anthropological Collections Curation Policy

This form is used to guide the faculty and staff of the Center of Southwest Studies and the Anthropology Department regarding management of all anthropological/ archaeological holdings in the Center building.

DRAFT

As agreed on February 8, 2000 by Susan Riches and James Judge on behalf of the Anthropology Department and Philip Duke on behalf of the Center of Southwest Studies, all anthropological/ archaeological collections housed in the Center of Southwest Studies building will be managed by the staff of the Center of Southwest Studies.

This includes acquisitions brought into the building by the Anthropology Department; the Center will accession those materials after that Department is finished analyzing them.  The Anthropology Department will assist the Center's staff by utilizing the same collections management software as the Center, by providing the Center's staff with the records and documentation related to the anthropologically-generated materials, by working with the Center's staff so as to avoid adding extraneous duplicate items to the collection (for example, metates and manos that might better be re-buried by the anthropologist/s), and where possible by assisting with the costs of supplies and other expenses relating to the curation of those materials.  Resources permitting, this curatorial management by the Center's staff will include cataloging them in the college's online catalog (at both a collection- and item-level), housing them archivally, and being responsible for their secure storage and for access to them.  Generally, ceramics and lithics (including groundstone) will be housed separate from the other artifacts, and groundstone and lithics will be housed separate from the ceramics.  The Center's professional staff will establish discrete collection titles and collection numbers (in accordance with the Center of Southwest Studies' numbering and accessioning sequences) for each of the collections.  Anthropology staff will have access to the stored archaeological collections in the Center. 

The objective of this policy is to centralize the curation of anthropological/ archaeological collections at the Center and to avoid duplication of activities relating to processing and curating the materials.

Page last modified: December 12, 2001