At the Archaeology and Collections annual public open house, EAL employee Asher shared a research project on Wesleyan’s collection of Ecuadorian Shuar ceremonial objects and garments. Asher participated in research on collections in Wesleyan’s missionary archive for a project completed in Fall 2024 in the course Missionary Mysteries: the Objects and Archives of Wesleyan’s Missionary Past taught by Professors Wendi Field Murray, Amanda Nelson, and Joseph Slaughter. 

A Wesleyan Episcopal missionary alumnus collected these objects from a Shuar community in Cuenca on a 1901 mission, then donated them to Wesleyan’s anthropology collections in 1909, where they remained in storage until 1974. We lost a lot of information about this collection as it degraded in storage and was poorly recorded in the museum’s archive. Using archival research and campus collections, Asher created an ArcGIS StoryMap to compile research findings and contextualize the Shuar traditions and cultural heritage represented in our collection. 

This project researched the cultural and spiritual meaning of the Shuar collection’s objects and their natural materials to provide important cultural context and history that was lost about them over time. At our open house table, visitors saw some of these ceremonial objects up close and guessed what they were made of. Each material component holds unique significance in Shuar spirituality, which visitors could explore themselves or learn about from Asher. The research in this project highlights the value of exploring a collection’s cultural context beyond existing archival information and of using legacy collections in new environmental and archaeological research.