Lisa Anderson, Dominique Cocuzza, Susan Heald, and Melinda McPeek
Introduction
The holdings of the National Museum of the American Indian consist of approximately 805,000 archaeological and ethnographic objects from Native peoples of the Western hemisphere. NMAI is currently in the process of relocating and re-housing the collection from its Bronx, New York Facility to the new “state-of-the-art” Cultural Resources Center (CRC) located in Suitland, MD. As part of the relocation effort, the collections management and conservation departments have collaborated to devise a re-housing system for over 2,000 archaeological textile fragments in the collection. These textiles are currently stored in polyethylene bags in wooden drawers in the museum’s Bronx storage facility. This project focuses on concerns for re-housing smaller archeological textiles and fragments, within the constraints of the entire re-housing effort.