Shedding light onto early Amerindian objects of the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden through the use of archaeometric analyses

Abstract

Given the recent attention to questions of ownership and restitution, museums are strongly investing in researching the provenance of their collections, using historical sources that document the context of acquisition and transfer of ownership of specific objects. However, many objects lack documented provenance, especially older collections (pre-1850). The present work is an interdisciplinary effort by archaeologists and anthropologists in applying archaeometric analytical methods on ethnographic Amerindians clubs housed in the Netherlands. In this article, we assess the promises and limitations of using strontium isotope analysis and radiocarbon dating to disentangle the archival knots that formed in museum catalogues since the early 19th century. Concretely, we analyzed five (supposedly) South-American wooden clubs from the collection of the former Dutch Royal Cabinet of Rarities, currently part of the collection of the National Museum of World Cultures in The Netherlands. Our results show that while cataloguing palimpsests can lead to the mislabeling of objects, archaeometric analyses can effectively help to correct these errors.