Long viewed as ‘kitchen middens’, the shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Area have -provided archaeologists of coastal California insight into the subsistence and ecology of precontact native groups. In this article, the authors develop a framework for understanding the cultural significance of these shellmounds which regards them as intentional cultural features, incorporates social context, and builds on earlier subsistence-focused studies of the shellmounds in order to better appreciate the meaning of the numerous human remains interred therein. A structural analysis is then used to show that the concepts of food and ancestors joined together at shellmounds, so much so that ritual attention to the ancestors was very likely regarded as essential to ensuring a continuing supply of food.

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 shel l mound, a site excavated in 1906 by one of North America's leading archaeologists. First, after core issues in archaeologi cal curation are examined, basic features of the site and its excavation are outlined. Next, the process of curating, reanalyzing, and establish ing 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 com munity are explored. Finally, to best manage these "old" archaeol ogy col lections, it is concluded that it is critical to recognize how much their research value has changed.

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