Collections care practices have become professionalized in the last 30 years, in large part because of the work of organizations such as the American Alliance of Museums, the Canadian Conservation Institute, the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections, the American Institute for Conservation, and others in the museum sphere. Advances in preservation and management have benefited the discipline of archaeology in the field and laboratory. This thematic issue provides an updated perspective on the current happenings in the repository, highlighting innovative techniques and practices that collections specialists employ when managing the archaeological record. This article considers a macroview of the issues surrounding archaeological curation today and ponders what the future of collections preservation can and should look like.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.