Archaeology Within the Museum: Uncovering Collections at the Milwaukee Public Museum

The relationship between archaeologists and museums is a close one: one provides the artifacts to display while the other provides a repository that can be used to research and examine large collections of artifacts. However, archaeologists don’t always analyze the material they bring back to museums due to time or budget restraints; every year of excavation often requires three or more years of analysis, and funds are more readily available for field work than for publication. This was the case with the Euphrates Valley Expedition Collection at the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM), which arrived in the 1970s. This SURF project focused on producing inventory sheets for each storage drawer of artifacts (around 10) from the Bronze Age site of El Qitar (sometimes spelled “Qatar”) in Syria. Because of the collection’s partially examined status, it was necessary to consult available excavation documents and the few available publications relating to the site. Over the course of the past two semesters, the majority of the MPM material from El Qitar has been documented. This sets the stage for future researchers and specialists to analyze this valuable collection, which is one of the few assemblages of Bronze Age material from this region in the United States. Given the significant amount of space taken up by this collection at the MPM, the plans for moving to a new and much smaller building in the next decade, and the fact that no local affiliated universities have archaeology faculty interested in this time period or area of the Near East, the goal is to find another institutional home for this material. This project has made such a transfer possible by generating an inventory of the material, which is necessary to provide greater context for the site and material it contains