It was the way the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York described its plans for 57,000 square feet of extended gallery space that caught my eye: “We have a sacred obligation to put this material on view,” said museum director Philippe de Montebello [BBC link] He is talking about 5000 Graeco-Roman artifacts, currently in…
cultural politics
manifesting archaeology
Joe Moore, retired photographer, is shedding light on California’s contradictory history. With a 132k dollar grant administered by the state library, Joe, librarians and archivists are gathering letters, family documents, court records, songs and photographs, about 800 documents, for an internet archive about slavery in California – the state that likes to think it entered…
the past clings
A reburial issue in San Francisco: SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco has finally found a resting place for the remains of nearly 100 Gold Rush-era residents unearthed three years ago during construction of the Asian Art Museum. Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, a small city with 17 cemeteries just south of San Francisco, has…
archaeological rats
There is a small exhibition on at the British Museum of a grave dating from the late third millennium/early second. The grave of a man dating to around 2,300BC was discovered three miles from Stonehenge by Wessex Archaeology staff in May 2002. His grave was the richest from this period (the early Bronze Age) ever…
Issues of cultural property – the usual tensions
Two articles this weekend about the Parthenon marbles. The Guardian reports a video making a case for the return of the marbles sent to 1000 members of Parliament in the UK. The New York Times yesterday ran an article about the guilt instilled by a new museum on the slopes of the Acropolis in Athens,…
archaeology needs bold science
A seminar with Bjørnar Olsen and and Chris Witmore at Stanford Archaeology Center. Our title Innocence regained? Is there a new consensus in archaeology? An alternative case for bold thinking. I wrote Social Theory in Archaeology and Reconstructing Archaeology back in the 1980s partly because I was so disenchanted with archaeological thinking – we wanted…