Robert-Goldwater-Library

Archaeology magazine, Sept./Oct. 2007

Selected features of interest in the September/October 2007 issue:

• From the President: Common Ground: Can archaeologists and museums work together?, by C. Brian Rose
• Destination: We asked pioneering archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni of Colgate University to name his favorite overlooked site
• Feature: A tangled journey home: Priceless artifacts return to Italy and Greece, but their histories remain lost, by Eti Bonn-Muller and Eric A. Powell.
• Museums: Ancient Americans (The Field Museum)
• Insider: The once and future Maya, by David Freidel [online version is an abstract]
• Letter from Peru: Mystery circles of the Andes, by Roger Atwood [online version is an abstract]

World Rock Art

Contents from Conservation, vol. 21, no. 3 (2006):

Rock Art Today
Rock art is a major part of our cultural heritage. It is certainly the most ancient and perhaps the most vulnerable. How can we best preserve the millions of images on rocks throughout the world, which constitute a kind of gigantic museum collection exposed to the depredations of nature and human activity?

Preserving a Worldwide Heritage: A Discussion about Rock Art Conservation
J. Claire Dean, an archaeological conservator in private practice; Josephine Flood, former director of the Aboriginal Environment section of the Australian Heritage Commission; and Jo Anne Van Tilburg, director of the Rock Art Archive at UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, talk with Neville Agnew and Jeffrey Levin of the Getty Conservation Institute.

U.S. Rock Art in the Twenty-first Century: Problems and Prospects
The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic change in the status of North American rock art, expressed in the United States by numerous research advances and a greater concern for conservation and site management. While these improvements are cause for optimism, serious problems persist, including the lack of trained rock art conservators and limited resources for site documentation and management.

Building Capacity to Conserve Southern African Rock Art
Over the years, the GCI has facilitated conservation and training programs to improve the management of rock art sites, particularly in the Americas and Australia. The lessons learned from these programs have been valuable in structuring the Institute's most recent involvement in rock art conservation—the Southern African Rock Art Project.

Access issues of Conservation, 1991-current, via WATSONLINE

Mummy dogs, Moo and Olmec writing

Of passing interest ...

A continuing series of irregular blog posts highlighting articles in the popular press -- in this instance, Archaeology.

Atwood, Roger. "Peru's mummy dogs: Are the country's beloved pets descendants of ancient llama herders?" Archaeology, vol. 60, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 2007), p. 42-43. col. ill.

McDaniel, Sean. "The lure of Móo: a Victorian archaeologist's obsession with a fictitious Maya queen." p. 48-51. ill. Augustus Le Plongeon.

"The Cascajal block." p. 72. col. ill. "What It Is: Tablet with the oldest writing found in the Western Hemisphere; Civilization: Olmec ..."

Scholars tangle over Maya collapse theories

Of passing interest ...

A continuing series of irregular blog posts highlighting articles in the popular press.

Werner, Louis. "The Maya war of words." Américas, vol. 58, no. 6 (Dec. 2006), p. 40-47. col. ill.

"Scholarly theories collide around the disappearance of the ancient Maya. How do you spell collapse?" 

Grisly excavations at Teotihuacán

Of passing interest ...

A continuing series of irregular blog posts highlighting articles in the popular press.

Williams, A.R.; photographs by Jesús Eduardo López Reyes. "Pyramids of Death." National Geographic, vol. 210, no. 4 (Oct. 2006), p. 144-153. col. ill.

"At the Pyramid of the Moon in central Mexico, humans and animals were buried alive. Excavations reveal the remains of sacrifices once witnessed by thousands of spectators."

• Click here for Web excerpt

Recent article on khipus

Of passing interest ...

A continuing series of irregular blog posts highlighting articles in the popular press.

Hardman, Chris. "Unraveling an Inca mystery." Américas, vol. 58, no. 5 (Oct. 2006), p. 48-55. col. ill.

"In the Andes [Laguna de los Cóndores near Chachapoyas, Peru], a burial-site discovery of knotted string called khipu has experts wondering what the ancients were trying to tell us."

American Museum of Natural History khipu illustration from The Khipu Connection

Maya Archaeological Photos Online

Harvard Library Digital Initiative and the Carnegie Institution of Washington Collection of Maya Archaeological Photographs / contributed by David Schafer, Senior Collections Manager

Symbols, Spring 2006

RGL call number: A S987

...[T]he Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) sponsored excavations at nearly 1,000 archaeological sites for over thirty years.  These excavations were supervised by notable archaeologists such as Alfred Kidder, Sylvanus Orley, Harry Pollock, Eric Thompson, Ledyard Smith, Edwin Shook, and Tatiana Proskouriakoff.  When CIW closed its anthropology division in 1958, the Peabody Museum acquired the archival records of the their excavations, including over 50,000 black-and-white negatives and photographs ...

Until recently, access to this important collection of photographs was limited to researchers who could spend days of weeks literally browsing through file cabinets full of pasted-up photoboards in the Peabody Museum archives.

The Peabody Museum recently completed a four-year cataloging and digitization project sponsored by the Harvard University Library Digital Initiative.  During the initial phase of this project, collections staff created 50,000 catalog records in the museum's database, using the old paper catalog cards.  Staff subsequently digitized and processed over 40,000 photographs, added enhanced descriptive data, and linked all the information to the database records ... Since copy-positive film does not exist for all 50,000 photographs, museum staff are currently using digital cameras to photograph some 15,000 remaining prints ...

The processed images are now available on-line at both the Peabody Museum's Collections Online website and the Harvard University Library Visual Information Access Database.

Pictured above: Sacred Cenote; Peabody Number 58-34-20/29798. Photograph. Central America; Mexico; Yucatan; Chichen Itza [source]

Paul Gebauer: A Legacy of Images

Paul Gebauer: A Legacy of Images / by Virginia-Lee Webb

in Tribal: the Magazine of Tribal Art 10 (4) / no. 41,  Summer 2006

RGL call number: A W97

Excerpt from the article: 

The name Gebauer is well known to people interested in the arts of Cameroon.  Paul Gebauer (1900-1977) spent nearly thirty years in that country as a member of the North American Baptist Mission but also as a photographer, scholar, and collector ...

Paul's arrival in Cameroon in 1931 began a lifetime of study during which he recorded the diverse aspects of traditional African art and culture around him.  He was mindful of the past in conjunction with his own religious agenda and rather than try to obliterate the powerful artistic traditions that surrounded him, he south to understand and preserve them ...

Paul was a gifted photographer and his legacy is significant.  The images reveal his interests, perceptions, and experiences, and provide a snapshot of the diverse communities he and his family lived in ... After Paul's death in 1977, most of his photographs were bequested to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Photograph Study Collection in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas ...

Tribal: the Magazine of Tribal Art is available online via WATSONLINE (2002-present)*

In the Goldwater Library:

Art of Cameroon : with a catalog of the Gebauer collection of Cameroon art at the Portland Art Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art / by Paul Gebauer. Portland, Ore. : The Portland Art Museum, in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1979.  RGL call number: O5P G29

Art of the Cameroon : an exhibition of historic photographs with objects from New York museums and private collections, February 22-May 24, 1980, The African-American Institute. New York, N.Y. : African-American Institute, [1980]. RGL call number: O2 N483arto

*N.B.: However, this particular issue is not yet available online.

Pictured above: Elephant masks, Cameroon.  Photo by Paul Gebauer, 1930s [source]

- - - UPDATE! - - -

As of 8/4/06, the Summer 2006 issue of Tribal: the Magazine of Tribal Art is now available online!

The decorated houses of Nubia

Written by Louis Werner, photographed by Michael Nelson

from Saudi Aramco World, July/August 2006 {full article here}

... EVEN MORE DISTINCTIVE than the floor plan of a Nubian house is the decoration of its exterior doorway, or bawaba, which mixes vivid color, adobe brick filigree, figurative and geometric images in mud and white lime-plaster relief, and wall-mounted objects like ceramic plates, automobile headlights, mirrors, cow horns and dried crocodiles. While the full range of these decorative materials has shrunk in recent years, the impulse to draw attention to one’s home, and to its doorway as a symbol of the family, remains strong.

The late art historian Marian Wenzel was a member of a multidisciplinary team that documented Nubian life and culture in the mid-1960’s, before it was submerged by Lake Nasser. Her book House Decoration in Nubia (1972, University of Toronto Press), which applied the methods of art criticism to social anthropology, established the chronology of design motifs and techniques in Upper Nubia during the 20th century. Starting with the supposition that no artwork is anonymous and no folk tradition is truly timeless, she determined that the iconography of Nubian house décor was a 20th-century phenomenon, traceable to the handiwork of a few known builders-turned-artist...

Guardian of a Ghost World : Ancient Fremont Culture

Guardian of a Ghost World / by David Roberts, photos by Ira Block

in National Geographic 210 (2) Aug 2006

RGL call number: A N227

Excerpt and photograph via nationalgeographic.com:

For 50 years Utah cattle rancher Waldo Wilcox protected an astounding collection of artifacts left by the prehistoric Fremont culture—including countless panels of rock art. "The Indian stuff? My father always said to leave it alone," he says. Which he did—and more. By gating the road to his property near the mouth of Range Creek Canyon, he blocked access to tens of thousands of acres of unspoiled backcountry where the Fremont had farmed, hunted game, and gathered wild plants from about A.D. 400 until their culture mysteriously disappeared almost a thousand years later. Ready to retire, Wilcox sold his land in 2001. The state of Utah, its current owner, is now responsible for managing the future of this priceless legacy ... [read more]

+ view more images in National Geographic's online photo gallery

+ related online resources about Fremont culture compiled by National Geographic

+ related RGL resources via WATSONLINE:

Exploring the Fremont / David B. Madsen. [Salt Lake City, Utah] : Utah Museum of Natural History, University of Utah, c1989.  RGL call number:  R9C M18

The Fremont culture : a study in culture dynamics on the northern Anasazi frontier : including the report of the Claflin-Emerson Expedition of the Peabody Museum / by James H. Gunnerson. Cambridge, Mass. : Peabody Museum, 1969.  RGL call number: A H339p  v.59

The ancient culture of the Fremont River in Utah : report on the explorations under the Claflin-Emerson fund, 1928-29 / by Noel Morss
Cambridge, Mass. : The Museum, 1931.  RGL call number: A H339p v.12