From Crystal Skulls to the Caste War Intersections of Tourism, Archaeology and Heritage in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico Figure 1. Tourists admire the “El Castillo” pyramid at the site of Chichen Itza in Yucatán, Mexico. Archaeological sites in the Yucatán…
Why the Present Matters: The Importance of Community Outreach and Public Engagement in Archaeology The authors with host, Eiden Salazar and Camera Tech, Kainie Manuel, after being interviewed on the Good Morning San Pedro Show. Courtesy of Tracie Mayfield. But it is more important — because more humanizing — for us to understand the…
Shifting Perspectives: The Man in Africa Hall at the American Museum of Natural History at 50 The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in NY circa 2000. Photo from Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. The “Man in Africa Hall” at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) opened on June 8, 1968, after seven…
Not for Sale: How WWII Artifacts Mobilized Japanese-Americans Online Banner of JA History Not for Sale Facebook page. On March 5, 2015, Eve M. Kahn’s “Newsworthy Notes” in the Antiques section of the New York Times included an announcement for a local auction alongside two short articles,…
The Nexus of Collaboration: Negotiating African American History and Public Interest in Southwest Virginia Tom Klatka pauses after clearing debris to expose the end of a grave shaft in the Kentland slave cemetery. Note the larger exposed grave shaft in the background. On a hazy June afternoon in 2003, we stood on a bluff overlooking the New…
Presumed Innocent: On Bill Traylor’s Verve Something was definitely stirring deep within William “Bill” Traylor. In a span of four years, he expunged a lot of it, producing 1200 drawings and paintings with graphite pencil stubs and poster paint on discarded cardboard. Traylor bears…
Refusing to Look Away: The Act of Killing and the Indonesian genocide of 1965 A portrait of Pak Kereta, a key contact during the author’s research in Indonesia. Photo by Robert Lemelson. The Act of Killing (2013). A Film by Joshua Oppenheimer. In the mid 1990s I was conducting transcultural psychiatric research in…
Aliens Before we can understand an alien civilization, it might be useful to understand our own. To help in this task, anthropologist Kathryn Denning of York University in Toronto, Canada studies the very human way that scientists, engineers and…
