At the January 2020 SHA Conference, Jamestown presented on a new collections management and material culture research initiative called the Jamestown Rediscovery Reference Collection. An effort to physically represent the breadth and depth of the Jamestown artifact assemblage and ensure that the material excavated from 1994-today is easily accessible, this work has been ongoing since. Combined with data management and catalog updates as well as dissemination of the work for both public interest and academic audiences, the development of the Reference Collection has resulted in incredible artifact research and critical thinking regarding the management of a collection of approximately 5 million artifacts. This paper will present the past 5 years of work by Jamestown Rediscovery curators and conservators, including a discussion of objects recovered from America’s first permanent English settlement which have directly benefited from this project.

James Fort, established in 1607, was the earliest successful English colony in North America. Weaponry was essential to the survival of the settlement, resulting in an abundance of arms and armor in the collection. As curators continue to establish the Jamestown Rediscovery Archaeological Reference Collection, this subset of materials is being revisited and the full array of recovered artifacts are being reexamined to observe more characteristics and details than initially could be recorded. Bandoliers, small tubes designed to hold charges of gunpowder, are found profusely throughout the site. There are approximately 2,500 bandolier elements currently cataloged including iron, copper alloy, lead, and leather artifacts. This paper will examine the variation within the collection, as well as their distribution across the site, to determine if there are any notable trends. This contributes to a larger project of examining the change in the English mindset via the arms and armor.

The archaeological collections of Historic St. Mary’s City represent some 50 years of continuous
archaeological work resulting in millions of artifacts. Many of these artifacts are elements of
clothing and accessories worn by the people who once lived there or the tools they used to create
and maintain garments. Among the current curatorial projects in the Department of Research and
Collections at Historic St. Mary’s City includes the organization of clothing-related artifacts from
the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries into a comparative study collection. The purpose of
this study collection is to ascertain the varieties of these types of artifacts in the collection and to
create an accessible location for these objects to be used by HSMC archaeologists and visiting
researchers. The following paper will detail the creation of this study collection, its contents, and
summarize current clothing and textile-related archaeological research ongoing at Historic St.
Mary’s City.

Prior to its demolition, a bustling Chinatown neighborhood had existed in Boise, Idaho, between 1870 and 1970. Today nearly all that physically remains of Boise’s Chinatown is an archaeological assemblage collected in advance of urban renewal in 1979 by the Boise Redevelopment Project. Despite representing the only urban Chinatown site in Idaho, the Boise Chinatown collection has never fully been catalogued, reported, or analyzed. This presentation will discuss ongoing rehabilitation of the assemblage as part of a larger collaborative project seeking to address legacy collections from Chinese diaspora sites across southern Idaho and present initial results from artifact reanalysis. Highlighting the collection’s admixture of Chinese, Japanese, and European material culture, it will also explore this multiethnic neighborhood’s significance in larger patterns of cultural exchange across the American West.

The value of legacy collections in museums and archives cannot be overstated, as they are increasingly recognized as vital resources for contemporary scholarship. These collections offer opportunities to ask new research questions and reevaluate long-held understandings. Accessing and interpreting them presents significant challenges, including incomplete or disorganized records and collections split across institutions. This presentation explores the Pleasant Hill Shaker Village collection, curated at the William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology, as a case study in navigating a neglected legacy collection. Excavated over thirty years ago and largely untouched since, the Pleasant Hill materials show how even fragmentary and poorly documented collections can yield valuable insights through modern frameworks. This case study highlights the potential of legacy collections to inform current research while also underscoring the labor-intensive process of reconstructing lost context. This emphasizes the need for ongoing institutional support to ensure their long-term preservation and accessibility for future research.