Unknown Burial Beads

 

Last year, the Guam Cultural Repository merged to become part of the Guam Museum (which in turn falls under the Department of CHamoru Affairs). While the facility has been open and active for several years now, many people are still unfamiliar with its genesis and purpose. 

 

For many decades, the Guam Museum acted as Guam's depository, holding a variety of historical or culturally significant materials for the public good. Since the 1970s, this has included archeological collections and also the remains from burials disturbed by construction. As a result the Guam Museum has grown since World War II, to a massive collection of several hundred thousand items, which break down into different categories, ranging from archives, to cultural and educational artifacts and finally things held for the people of Guam in our depository/repository function. 

 

In the storage annex for the Guam Museum we have close to 2,000 boxes of artifacts, soil samples, project files and more, all of which represents this archeological collection. When you scan the many boxes you will see that many are tied to Guam's development, you'll see hotel names such as Fujita and Hyatt, condo developments such as Villa Kånton Tåsi or tourist/leisure sites such as Sandcastle or Mangilao Golf Course. 

 

The Guam Cultural Repository, is a facility where the construction was funded by the US federal government as part of the mitigation for the military buildup. But its operations are paid for primarily by the local government. Part of its purpose is to take on these archeological collections from the Guam Museum, other collections that cultural resource management firms have been holding on to, and future artifacts that are recovered during construction.

As more and more boxes are transferred into the Guam Cultural Repository, we learn more about our past, and we also learn more about the backlog of artifacts the museum has been caring for for decades. 

 

For while, the Guam Museum has been responsible since the early 1970s for holding and storing archeological collections, there have never been funds or staff provided to adequately record or curate these materials. Two thousands of boxes of material is hundreds of thousands of pieces from hundreds of different projects spread across every village on Guam. Some have complete records and are easy to understand, others have no records, just boxes with artifacts and little to no information. 

 

Recently I came across one such box. It had in it, beautiful shell beads that notes identified were found as part of burials. This image features some of them. It also included fish hooks, and other tools, all in the same box. There were numbers for each item. But there were no notes or records in the box or on the box to indicate the year of the project or the location.

A long term intensive investigation might eventually lead us to answers on where this and hundreds of other boxes like this that lack sufficient records or markings are from. Hu diseseha mohon. I surely hope so. While it is wonderful to have the pieces preserved. It nonetheless feels incomplete not being able to connect them to a location and to the people to once made these, wore these, used these and were buried with them.