Tag Archives: Museums

The Last Place on Earth for Humans

March 30, 2010

While I was at the Bowers Museum in California this past weekend giving a talk on mummies,  Peter Keller called me into his office to take a gander at something remarkable.  Keller is the director of the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana,  California,  and the man who succeeded in bringing the very famous Tarim Basin mummies and their associated artifacts to North America for the exhibition,  Secrets of the Silk Road:  The Mystery Mummies of China.   These European looking mummies,  some as old as 4000 years,  have never travelled outside Asia.

Keller had just located the earliest known necropolis in the Tarim Basin,  the site known in English as Small River Cemetery No. 5 and in Mandarin as Xiaohe,  on Google Earth.  And the two of us spent a good half hour or so examining the area with researcher Victor Mair.  This made a great impression on me.

The Tarim Basin lies at the very heart of Asia,  nearly encircled by steep snow-capped mountains.  It is an exceptionally harsh, forbidding land.  In summer,  temperatures there can soar as high as 125 degrees Fahrenheit; in winter,  they plummet to minus 40.  And it is one of the most arid places on Earth,  right up there with the Atacama Desert.   For all these reasons,  modern humans took their time settling the Tarim Basin.  Indeed Victor Mair,  the sinologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied these mummies for nearly twenty years, suggests that the Tarim Basin was the last place on Earth to be colonized by humans.   And this didn’t happen until some 4000 years ago.

In the reign of Mao Tse-tung,  the Chinese government put all this harshness to work.  It constructed labor camps in the Tarim Basin,  knowing that the desert would be a powerful deterrent to escape.  And it built a nuclear testing range there,  confident  that  no one would dream of crossing the barrens to spy.

It is one thing to know all this intellectually.  It is quite another to see all the desolation of the Tarim Basin on Google Earth.  Small River Cemetery No. 5,  named for a stream that no longer exists,  is surrounded by miles and miles of sand dunes,  dried river and stream beds,  and pure nothingness.  If you’d like to see for yourself what I’m talking about,  here are the coordinates:  40 degrees,  20 minutes, 11 seconds North and 88 degrees, 40 minutes and 20.3 seconds East.   (And if anyone knows how I can embed the Google Earth photo of the site in this blog,  please leave a comment below.)  I can give you these coordinates without any fear of encouraging looting,  as Chinese archaeologists have now completely excavated Small River Cemetery No. 5,  and reconstructed the site,  with its remarkable phallic looking wooden posts.

Surveying the area via Google Earth has given me a whole new appreciation for the Bronze -Age Europeans and Asians who colonized this region some 4000 years ago.  Mair believes that water would have flowed then along many of the small streambeds that meander through the desert.  I’m sure he’s right:  how else could the colonists have survived there?

But life must have been a daily grind in the Tarim Basin,  and I often wonder if the early migrants didn’t drift off to sleep each night dreaming of their greener and gentler homelands.

The Silk Road Merchant Who Loved Haute Couture

March 29, 2010

I have just returned from a three-day trip to California,  where I attended the opening of a major new exhibit on the Tarim Basin mummies.   The new exhibition at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana did not disappoint.  I spent hours  marvelling at the mummies and nearly 150 spectacular artifacts which date as early as the Bronze Age,  4000 years ago.  I’ll be writing about some of the more fascinating aspects of the exhibit this week.  But today,  I’ve posted an entry over at Archaeology magazine on the sartorial splendor –no other way to describe it–of one of the mummies,  Yingpan Man.  Please click here to read today’s post.

Bronze-Age Europeans in China

March 18, 2010

Both the Grey Lady,  the New York Times,  and USA Today,  have run stories (here and here) this week on the forthcoming exhibition of China’s famous Tarim Basin mummies and their gravegoods and possessions at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California.  The three mummies in the exhibit are European in appearance and date back as early as 4000 years,  long before the opening of the Silk Road in the 2nd century B.C.

I have a very short interview with Victor Mair,  a Sinologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the leading  expert on these mummies, coming out in Science magazine later today.  In addition,  I have penned a feature article for Archaeology on Victor Mair and the latest research  in the Tarim Basin,  which will hit newstands in June.

But I will be attending the opening of the exhibition next weekend as a guest of honor,  as the Bowers Museum has invited me to give a talk on mummies on Sunday,  March 28th.   So I will be posting here on my impressions on this major new exhibition.   Chinese authorities have never before permitted any of the Tarim Basin mummies to travel outside Asia.

I should mention, however,  that I have  seen some of these mummies before.  A decade ago,  I joined Victor Mair and a geneticist colleague in Shanghai while they were trying to obtain permission to sample some of the mummies for  DNA testing.  At that time,  I was fortunate enough to be taken down into a basement room at Shanghai’s Museum of Natural History,  where one of the Tarim Basin mummies lay in a glass case.  Later,  I  wrote a chapter in my book,  The Mummy Congress,  on the finds from the Tarim Basin.

These are extraordinary mummies.  Their preservation is superb and they are daily revealing more about the lives of Bronze Age European migrants to Central Asia.  I’ll have a lot more to say about this in a week’s time!

Photo by Wang da Gang

Repatriating the Lewis Chessmen from the British Museum

March 17, 2010

I sometimes think that one of the worst jobs in archaeology today would be  to work as a curator at the British Museum.  Yes,  there is the prestige of researching and mounting massive exhibitions that attract international attention.   But who would want to be on the receiving end of all the ire of foreign governments who want their treasures back,  from Iran demanding the loan of the Cyrus cylinder to Greece pressuring for the return of the Parthenon marbles?  And I sure wouldn’t want Zawi Hawass lecturing me on the return of the Rosetta Stone.

Now a new front has opened up in the diplomatic war to pry loose national treasures from the British Museum showcases–and it’s not at all where you might think it would be.  Last week,  Scottish National Party MP Angus MacNeil called for a debate in the British House of Commons over the repatriation of the very famous Lewis Chessmen discovered in a sandbank on the Isle of  Lewis,  in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides Islands sometime before 1831.

First a very short primer on the Lewis Chessmen,  which are my all time favorite artifacts from Medieval Europe.    A 12th century artist carved the exquisitely beautiful  chess pieces–93 in all–mostly from walrus ivory,  which could well have come from the Greenland colonies,  or possibly even from the Canadian Arctic.  (That’s another story  I’ll save for another day.)  No one knows for certain, however,  where the chessmen were carved,  although some scholars lean towards Trondheim in Norway,  since similar chess pieces were found there.   How these wonderful chessmen–one of the best preserved sets from the medieval world- came to lie in a sand dune near Uig on the Isle of Lewis is unknown.

Shortly after they came to light in 1831, however,  the Hebridean finder decided to sell them.  A private  buyer purchased 11 of the pieces and the rest went to the British Museum, which displays several of these miniature artworks  in one of its galleries.

But now people in the Outer Hebrides want their famous chessmen back.  Indeed, their MP Angus MacNeil is working hard to repatriate them to the Museum nan Eilean in  Stornoway,  the major town of the Outer Hebrides.  And what has provoked this protest?   It appears that the  British Museum has stepped very clumsily on toes and local sensitivities in the Outer Hebrides.  Its curators have been working on a major travelling exhibit of the chesspieces to Scotland and according to a recent online article in The Press and Journal, advertising for the forthcoming exhibit attributes the chesspieces to Norwegian craftsmen,  completely ignoring the possibility that they were carved in the Outer Hebrides.

Is this just a tempest in a teapot?  I don’t think so.   The Lewis chesspieces are objects of of immense pride in the Outer Hebrides,  and someone at the British Museum should have known this.  I am becoming more and more sympathetic all the time to foreign governments and even local museums who want to repatriate their greatest treasures from the vaults and exhibition cases of the British Museum.  It think it’s patronizing in the extreme today to think that only the big national museums in developed countries know how to take care of the world’s most important cultural heritage.

Signs of Respect

March 11, 2010

As regular readers will know,  I  recently fumed here over the poor conservation of a petroglyph-covered  boulder at the Vancouver Museum,  after reading a troubling post over at Northwest Coast Archaeology.   I questioned the wisdom of removing such boulders and slabs from the  places where they were created and installing them in  museums.  I then suggested that the Vancouver Museum repatriate the damaged boulder in question.

Since then,  Northwest Coast has posted more on this disturbing state of affairs, and recently  I received a great email on these issues from George Nicholas, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University and the director of Intellectual Property issues in Cultural Heritage. George is kindly guest-blogging on this today. -HP


I think the notion that rock art is about more than the images is something that has been largely ignored, certainly by the public, but also by many archaeologists and anthropologists. People often tend to focus on the details of the images, rather than on the context of the rock art. But one doesn’t work without the other.

In his book Ways of Seeing, John Berger notes that before photography, before the age of reproductive technology, one could only see a particular image (such as the Last Supper fresco) in the church in which it was painted. The same obviously holds true for Lascaux and all other rock art.

Taken out of their geographic context, the images are divorced not only from the place itself (which may be imbued with meaning of its own), but also from the emotional landscape and viewscape. I’m sure you’ve been to petroglyph sites where there’s sort of a mystical feel to the place. I find that at the Three Sister’s Rockshelter in British Columbia’s Marble Canyon. The silence of the moss-filled forest that surrounds the blue-grey rock face adds an important dimension to the rock art.

And of course, we approach rock art from the perspective of the western world. Our worldview is based on a set of dichotomies: the distinctions between the natural and supernatural realms; between people and nature; between past, present, and future; between genders, and all the rest. Such distinctions may be absent, however, in many indigenous societies; they may live in a world in which ancestral spirits are part of this existence (owing to lack of separation between past and present; between natural and supernatural realms).

So all of this, then, begs several questions. What does rock “art” really represent?  How are we supposed to view it? What should we do with it, from a heritage preservation perspective? Indeed, is rock art something that should be preserved?

Most western archaeologists would say yes to the latter question.  But in Australia, contemporary Aboriginal persons sometimes paint over ancient images as a way of continually replenishing the world; it is the act of painting that is important (like the creation of Navajo sand paintings used in healing ceremonies, and later destroyed, much to the consternation of western observers).

The Zuni people have a similar tradition.  They carve wooden figurines of their war gods, the Ayahu:ta, and place them in outdoor shrines. After a period of time, the figurines are replaced with new ones. Zuni tribal member and archaeologist Edmund Ladd notes in his writings that “When a new image of the Ahayu:ta is installed in a shrine, the ‘old’ one is removed to ‘the pile,’ which is where all the previous gods have been lain. This act of removal specifically does NOT have the same connotations as ‘throwing away’ or ‘discarding.’ The image of the god that has been replaced must remain at the site to which it was removed and be allowed to disintegrate there.” So, from a Zuni perspective, proper stewardship is letting the ahayu:ta decay.

Rock art raises many fundamental issues,  as well as conflicting claims that certain items of heritage belong to a specific group or are part of the heritage of human kind. In recent decades, archaeologists have been very much part of this debate.

My own position is that I see merit in both positions, but also that the tension between the two positions is important because it forces us (as archaeologists, as heritage managers, as member of descendant communities, etc) to think about the nature of heritage in new ways.

-George Nicholas

Above:  The rock art of Bohuslan, Sweden.  Photo by Julius Agrippa.  Below:  Contemporary Aboriginal artist Mundara Koorang. Photo by Novyaradnum.

Slavery and the Power of a Story

March 9, 2010

As an archaeological journalist,  I  long ago learned the value and importance of storytelling.  My articles often open anecdotally,  with a brief  story that I hope will seduce readers into staying with me as I explore the science of a new excavation or find.   I love telling stories,  and if I have good material to work with,  these leads often write themselves.

Story-telling is an immensely powerful medium,  perhaps the most direct and intense way of communicating basic truths that we humans have.  And yet it is one that archaeologists rarely tap into when they try to communicate  their findings to the public. I think this is a great shame,  for the artifacts that archaeologists work with often tell immensely compelling stories,  stories that allow readers to connect strongly with the past.

I was reminded of this today while  listening to a superb online interview with Lonnie Bunch,  the director of an important new museum in the planning stages, The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture.   Bunch was talking about how Smithsonian curators decide which donations to accept and which to reject,  a topical subject for he had just turned down the suit that O.J. Simpson wore to court on the day of his acquittal.

The  interviewer asked Bunch about the most surprising donations he had received, and this is where the interview took soaring flight,  as Bunch left the tawdry, tabloid story behind.  He described a recent acquisition,  a humble pillowcase that someone had brought in.  It was,  he explained,  embroidered by an enslaved woman who was about to be sold the next day.

The embroidered inscription was for her daughter.  It read:  “In this pillowcase, you will find a dress,  some biscuits,  but what you will [also] find is that it is filled with love,  and,  though you will never see me again,  always know how close you are to my heart.”

For me,  this one humble artifact said more about the horrors of slavery than many lengthy archaeological reports I have recently read about excavations in the slave quarters of southern plantations.  I felt an instant, direct,  immediate connection to that long-ago grieving mother,  as one human being to another.  Bunch clearly knows how to communicate to the public, and I really look forward to seeing this new museum when it opens five years from now.

Moreover,  it seems to me that many archaeologists could learn something important from this museum director.  Sometimes all it takes is one well-chosen artifact with a story to bring the past back vividly to life.

Sex and Rubbers in the City

February 7, 2010

In case you missed it,  the New York Times ran an intriguing review this week of a new museum exhibition,  “Rubbers:  The Life,  History and Struggle of the Condom.”  Currently running at the city’s Museum of Sex,  the exhibit highlights both the history and modern-day politics of the French letter.

Should We Be Repatriating Rock Art?

February 2, 2010

My cup of  Starbucks Breakfast Blend wasn’t the only thing steaming this morning as I read today’s post over at Northwest Coast Archaeology.  It seems that the folks at the Vancouver Museum,  whose job it is to carefully and lovingly preserve its collections for future generations,  are allowing a rare treasure from British Columbia’s Fraser River to crumble and flake into oblivion.  The treasure in question is a massive 5-6 ton boulder once blanketed with petroglyphs. According to the museum,  the art-inscribed boulder once lay in the bed of the Fraser River,  and may have marked an ancient salmon harvesting site.

The petroglyphs are in a dire, near-death state.  In sharp contrast to their striking appearance in a 1930s photograph,  you can barely make them out now.   Partially covered with destructive moss,  the animal figures and other inscriptions are literally disappearing before our eyes–vanishing,  one might add,  as surely as the once bountiful runs of  Fraser River salmon are.  I can’t believe that a museum is allowing this to happen.

But it’s all part and parcel of a much, much larger problem.  Most people,  I’m sorry to say, just don’t value or respect,  much less understand,  ancient rock art. They feel no compunction about prying loose a painted or inscribed boulder from the spot where it was created hundreds or even thousands of years earlier and hauling it off to a museum,  archaeological park or even a private garden.  They think rock art is simply about the art itself–the often mysterious figures painted or inscribed on stone.

But rock art is all about place.    It was created in a specific spot that had great meaning to the ancient artist–a spot, for example,  that looked out on a sacred mountain,  a place where fish were abundant or easy to catch,  or a trail head for a mountain pass or trade route.   For me, there  is nothing more wonderful and exhilarating than coming across a panel of  rock art while I am out hiking with friends.  I love,  of course, to study the inscriptions and photograph them,  and think about what they might mean. But even more than that,  I like to reflect and puzzle over the place itself.   Why did the artists choose that mountain cliff  or this boulder on the beach?  Why there? What made it an important place? What was the artist honoring?

By contrast,  nothing makes me sadder than to see a slab of rock art sitting in a museum foyer or archaeological park.  It looks like an orphan to me,  cut off and isolated from everything that once gave it meaning.  It honors no place any longer,  its meaning has been lost,  its beauty and wonder sadly diminished.

I wonder if it isn’t time to start repatriating rock art in museum collections.  Giving it back to First Nations who may still have stories about where it once stood or belonged. Certainly the First Nations would value it more and take better care of it than that Fraser River boulder at the Vancouver Museum.

Today’s photo shows Buffalo Eddy 2 Petroglyphs at Nez Perce National Historic Park.  Photo courtesy of Nez Perce National Historic Park.

Frank Lloyd Wright and His Desert Camp

January 22, 2010

A few weeks back,  I had the great pleasure of touring Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s school and winter camp in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was a surprisingly raw, blustery day, and I joined one of the tours that wend frequently through the sprawling desert complex.  As I am sure you know, Frank Lloyd Wright, was one of America’s greatest architects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,  a genius of concrete and glass and light,  and his winter camp, though roughhewn and experimental looking,  did not disappoint.

Wright died in 1959,  but his spirit was  still very much alive at Taliesin West.  At one point in the tour,  for example,  I briefly spied,  through the glass windows of a room off-limits to the public, a stooped, elderly figure swiftly fleeing like a startled bird into some hidden room.   I later learned that he was a member of The Fellowship,  one of Wright’s aged former students who resides at Taliesin West.   Like the British aristocrats who open their castles and estates to the public in order to pay the upkeep,   the Fellowship does not care much for tourists.  But the steep entrance fees provide Wright’s fellows with one of the most beautiful and elite retirement homes in North America.

I found many things about Taliesin West fascinating.  Wright’s students, for example, had to be a hardy,  self-sufficient lot.   When the newest students arrived at the camp, their first assignment was to design and build a shelter in the nearby desert,  where they would live while attending Wright’s school.   Some of these shelters grew quite elaborate over time,  as their builders added more space,  but none possessed much in the way of creature comforts.  I can imagine that some future archaeologists will have a great deal of fun digging what remains of these imaginative shelters.

When Wright purchased the land for Taliesin West in the 1930s,  it possessed an unparalleled view of a desert wilderness,  precisely what he was looking for.  So he designed the complex so that it would face out into the sweeping desert below. Civilization soon caught up with Taliesin West,  however:   someone built a home in its sightlines,  and the residential lights at night apparently threw Wright into a state of despair.

But he was not easily defeated. He did not want to pick up and start afresh somewhere else, so he reoriented the entire complex so that it would look out upon a mountain that rose in the opposite direction.

I’m posting below a wonderful little YouTube video taken in 1933 of the Taliesin Fellowship. It was filmed by a former student in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where Wright and his proteges spent their summer.