Tag ‘em and bag ‘em : deaccessioning and disposal of archaeological material in museum collections.

Archaeologists excavate to find out more about our prehistory. The more artifacts we dig up and preserve the more the potential to extract knowledge about the past from them grows. But some people are starting to get worried how we are going to be able to keep all the things we excavate. The museums are already filled to the brim, but the stream of new objects does not stop. We are, according to those people, in a curation crisis. This study aims to investigate how the laws and regulations of disposal of the archaeological artifacts in museums collections translate to practice. Through interviews and analyzing laws and guidelines I aim to study how those in charge of disposal navigate between the need of more archaeological material versus the need to make more room in the collections, and how the guidelines over disposal gets implemented in practice. The conclusions of this paper is that Swedish museums employees generally thinks that the guidelines are easy to work with, however they rarely dispose of archaeological artifacts, instead they rely on it being done in the field