Taylor Pastor

This project centered around the provenance of an object found within an Indianapolis museum’s collection without identification.

This study intended to help the museum identify the origin of a beaded necklace mystery object. It compared and contrasted the mystery object to a similar necklace found within the Anchorage Museum’s online collection and highlighted the differences between these two items with the theory of historical particularism. Also, the project looked at the use of glass beads and animal sinew within the two necklaces to discover the period and region that the item belonged to. To help understand the patterns within the mystery object’s features, the unidentified object’s color and number symbolism was compared to Plains tribes’ cosmologies to decipher their underlying social meanings. This was done to pinpoint the object’s culture of origin and purpose. Further, the study’s goal was not to determine a definitive identity for the mystery object but to showcase a new way of investigating unidentified objects found within collections that can assist in repatriation efforts. This theory-based research seeks to helped the museum create a new dialog with Native tribes in hopes of bringing the unidentified object from the collection home to its rightful owners.

This project is incredibly special to me, as it was the first time I presented independent research!