Like many institutions housing significant archaeological collections, the University of Manitoba faces considerable challenges in implementing best practices for collections management. These challenges make it difficult to meet the ethical obligations of a curatorial facility, including responsible collections care, sharing collections with descendant communities and the public, and repatriation. The current curatorial landscape in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Manitoba is a result of 61 years of practice that emphasized archaeological collection with little planning for long-term collections management. Today, the collection at the Department consists of roughly 250,000 pieces of material heritage at various stages of post-field processing supported by metadata of varying completeness and quality.

This presentation will include a frank discussion of archaeological curation at the University of Manitoba, the barriers these present to meeting the basic ethical obligations of a public facility housing archaeological heritage, and our plan for addressing these challenges. We hope this discussion will be helpful to others working through similar issues toward responsible, ethical curation.