With National Science Foundation support, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Kansas will upgrade the level of curation for archaeological materials from 23 sites in Missouri and Kansas. All date to the Middle Woodland period and the collections were acquired by the museum from 1963 to 1975. In their current state, the materials are subject to deterioration, accompanying information is vulnerable to potential destruction and the collections are not readily available for scientific study. Specimens are currently stored in paper bags in overcrowded boxes. Accompanying provenience information is available only in paper form. To remedy these problems, the project will include: repacking all artifacts into polyethylene bags and acid free boxes; labeling all boxes with specific content information; labeling all artifacts currently missing this information; recording the provenience information from these artifacts as well as all existing catalog information directly onto a relational database file for easy access to students and researchers. Anthropologists wish to understand how complex societies develop and many have focused on the Hopewell phenomenon in the midwest United States. Long before the arrival of Columbus, Native American groups established a village way of life, developed long distance trading systems which brought salt water shells and other exotic objects into the region and built large earthen mounds which served religious functions. The materials held by the Museum of Anthropology can shed light on how this phenomenon developed and therefore are of great anthropological interest. However the materials are difficult to access and lack of a computerized index makes them difficult to find. Therefore they are not readily available for scientific study. This award will remedy the situation.
