On the evening of March 10th, 2016, Dr. César Astuhuamán Gonzáles - named faculty at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima, Peru - presented his method for conducting research on museum collections. While many scholars favor field research, museum collections present two advantages: first, they are more accessible than overseas field sites for students and advanced scholars; second, scholars have an ethical responsibility to capitalize on the heaps of collections in museum storerooms that may otherwise lay idle and unstudied.
Dr. Astuhuamán's method for museum collection studies can be described as 'collection and artifact biographies.' He suggested that students should first develop a biography of the collection. For example, a collection of artifacts in the Harvard Peabody Museum was collected in 1916 in Peru. It moved several times around the Western Hemisphere before arriving at the Peabody. At the Peabody the artifacts were split up by material (e.g., wood, metal, cloth, human remains), which decontextualized artifacts that went together in real life - for example, the clothing and grave goods that were interred together as part of a mummy bundle in the 15th or 16th century.
Dr. Astuhuamán traced the biography of the entire 1916 collection as well as the biographies of each individual item. He correlated the numerous inventories, archival records, and research notebooks in Peru and the US in which the objects had been recorded. Following these "biographical" investigations, Dr. Astuhuamán demonstrated that social relationships - like interregional relocation - can be reconstructed through appropriately-recontextualized museum studies.
Though innovative and sophisticated, this kind of research is certainly more feasible than many field studies for scholars, graduate, and undergraduate students - especially under faculty guidance.
