The Tombigbee Historic Townsites Project: A New Look at a Previously Excavated Collection

With the curation crisis growing more prominent in the realm of archaeology, research focus is slowly being shifted to previously excavated collections that are under analyzed and underreported. Many of these previously excavated collections are overlooked by potential researchers because of the perceived difficulties of re-establishing provenience and quantitative control for artifacts that have been long separated from their original archaeological context. Since 2009, the Veterans Curation Program (VCP) has rehabilitated 231 at-risk United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) owned archaeological collections. The Tombigbee Historic Townsites Project is one such collection. Completed in 1983, this project aimed to salvage data from three of the earliest towns situated along the Tombigbee River in the eastern region of Clay County, Mississippi. This paper will provide an overview of the research and educational opportunities that can be derived from the analysis of transferware in a previously excavated collection.