How to address a ‘curation crisis’: rethinking collection storage at the Museum of Tropical Queensland

Price, Sophie

doi:10.1080/09647775.2023.2235681

Museum Management and Curatorship

2023

DOI: 10.1080/09647775.2023.2235681

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How to address a ‘curation crisis’: rethinking collection storage at the Museum of Tropical Queensland

Sophie Price

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2024

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Cited by 2 publications

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“…This collections work is situated within evolving, future-oriented, disciplinary dialogues that consider decolonizing archaeology so as to move toward more inclusive practices (Flewellen et al 2021), more responsive and responsible work with regard to repatriation (Dunnavant et al 2021), revising curricula to reflect the changing priorities of the discipline (Quave et al 2021;Thomas 2023), and the growth and role of cultural resource management (CRM; Altschul and Klein 2022). The deeply entrenched "curation crisis" and its pervasive effect across all areas of archaeology (Marquardt et al 1982;Price 2023) also shapes this theme issue. All these topics, and others, show us that some restructuring of our current practices is necessary to protect the core-the "heart"-of the discipline (Lyons et al 2019) and ensure the future vitality of the profession.…”

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A Collections-Based View of the Future of Archaeology

Domeischel,

Childs

2024

Adv. archaeol. pract.

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This theme issue has two primary goals: to illuminate the underdeveloped or faltering areas of the discipline as they relate to archaeological collections and to offer tangible paths forward to address the systemic problems identified as they impact the future of archaeology. Present-day archaeology is complicated due to its many sectors of practice: academia/faculty; cultural resource management; federal, state, and local government; tribal governments and communities; descendant communities; students; the general public; and different types of archaeological repositories. Given this complexity, it can be difficult to identify the expectations (and realities) of each sector, which, if better understood, would help illuminate the nuances of preservation, accountability, discoverability, and use of archaeological collections across the discipline. Without a solid understanding of these nuances, efforts to advance the discipline are undermined. This introduction provides an overview of the articles that address emerging and urgent issues and offer viable steps forward. These challenges include the interrelationships between ethics, collaboration, and training; the preservation and management of digital records and data; collections discovery and reuse; collections-based research; training in material culture; making collections knowable to constituencies outside archaeology; preparing for repatriation from a management perspective; and the intricacies of the archaeological digital data system.

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confidence: 99%

A Collections-Based View of the Future of Archaeology

Domeischel,

Childs

2024

Adv. archaeol. pract.

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AMSD: The Australian Message Stick Database

Kelly,

Lei,

Bibiko

et al. 2024

PLoS ONE

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Message sticks are wooden objects once widely used in Indigenous Australia for facilitating important long-distance communications. Within this tradition an individual wishing to send a message would carve a stick and apply conventional symbols to its surface. The stick was entrusted to a messenger who carried the object into the territory of another community together with a memorised oral statement. Between the 1880s and the 1910s, settlers and international scholars took great interest in message sticks and this was reflected in efforts to document, collect and store them in museums worldwide. However, by this period, the practice was already undergoing profound changes, having been abandoned in many parts of the continent and transformed in others. While message sticks were still being used in a traditional way in Western Arnhem Land up until at least the late 1970s, today they feature in public interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations, in art production and in oral narrations. Accordingly many questions concerning the history, pragmatics and global significance of message stick communication remain unanswered. To address this we have compiled the Australian Message Stick Database, a new resource hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, and The Australian National University, Canberra. It contains images and data for over 1500 individual message sticks sourced from museums, and supplemented with information derived from published and unpublished manuscripts, private collections, and from field recordings involving contemporary Indigenous consultants. For the first time, knowledge about Australian message sticks can be evaluated as a single set allowing scholars and Traditional Owners to explore previously intractable questions about their histories, meanings and purposes.

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How to address a ‘curation crisis’: rethinking collection storage at the Museum of Tropical Queensland

Cited by 2 publications

References 11 publications

A Collections-Based View of the Future of Archaeology

A Collections-Based View of the Future of Archaeology

AMSD: The Australian Message Stick Database

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