Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Front cover: Left top: Quilled moccasins, Oglala Sioux, Rudolf F. Haffenreffer Collection; bottom: Plaster life casts in Facing the Museum exhibition, American Museum of Natural History transfer. Center: Taoist painting depicting Tai Wai the High Constable, Mien, Thailand, Haffenreffer Family Fund purchase. Right top: Narragansett stone wall builders at work outside Manning Hall; bottom: Crafting Origins: Creativity and Continuity in Indigenous Taiwan exhibition.
Steven Lubar
A year ago, in my first directors note, I proudly pointed to the range of exhibitions the museum had produced from Haitian Vodou to the history of Columbus Day. We can point to an equally wide range of exhibitions this year, too. Visitors to Manning Hall could learn about the first century of Rhode Island, crafts of the indigenous peoples of Taiwan, and Taoist paintings of the Mien people of Thailand.
Our exhibitions, and many of our other programs this year, reflect an increased engagement across the university, and new connections with institutions beyond Brown. This year was Year of China at Brown. We took advantage of that with co-sponsored lectures, and used the opportunity to show off our Chinese collections not just the Taiwan and Taoist exhibits at Manning, but also our imperial Chinese robe, in our display case in the Roberts Student Center. Weve expanded our strong partnership with the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, and built connections with many academic departments. External partners this year include the RISD Museum and the Rhode Island Historical Society. Exhibitions show off the remarkable range of our collections, as well as the expertise of faculty, staff, and students. But they are just the most visible part of our work. Behind the exhibits and the programs stands a museum infrastructure: spaces, collections, knowledge. Last year we got our storage into pretty good shape, completing the conversion of the old museum in Bristol to the Collections Research Center. This year we built a new infrastructure that will allow us to use our space in Manning Hall in ways that better support our educational mission. Visitors to Manning will spot the difference immediately. Design work by Erin Wells Design, a Cambridge firm, has helped us optimize and rationalize our space. Designers Erin Wells and Mark Foster analyzed our space and devised a flexible plan that will provide a coherent structure for a diverse set of exhibitions. A central nave defines the space. Short walls mounted around building columns allow openings for three exhibition spaces. Small exhibits can fit into the nave, too. Erin Wells Design also produced our new logo, the graphics that have redefined the museums entryways, and templates that will allow us to produce exhibitions easily.
Central to our new use of Manning is CultureLab, the Haffenreffers signature educational space. Its a hands-on, open-storage teaching space a combination seminar room, collections processing space, and laboratory. You can learn more about it elsewhere in this report, but the best way to understand it is to visit. Take a look at the collections being used in classes and some student-curated exhibits. Talk to the student CultureLab assistants. Get hands-on with some artifacts weve made available for teaching. This second note from the director is my last. I signed on for two years, which is up this summer. I have enjoyed the museum and have come to appreciate what a wonderful resource it is for the university. Ive gotten to know the collections, the staff, the Friends, and the faculty and students who have worked with the museum. There is still much to be done. Collections always need more cataloging, and we need to get information about them on the web. Most important, they need to be more extensively used: faculty and students across the university need to think of the museum as a resource for teaching, learning, and research. Thats the ongoing project of any university museum. In July, Ill go back to teaching about museums. I wish the museum the very best, and look forward to becoming one of many faculty who use the museum in my teaching and research.
the existing columns. The panels carried the introductory graphics for each exhibit and, at the east, for the Museum, thereby emphasizing the east entry. Templates for all the graphics ensured a consistent museum identity, clear hierarchy, and accessible format, while also making new exhibits easy to produce and assemble. For the CultureLab, a different look was developed: laboratory cabinets, countertops, and furniture created a laboratory ambience while meeting the practical needs of museum staff and guests working with actual artifacts. Color and light provided final touches. The front of the exhibit panels and existing exhibit wall were painted the same color, tying the new exhibit architecture together as a whole and making it distinct from the historic building. Changes to lighting
an essential exhibit element, often overlooked were suggested by Abernathy Lighting Design. Our intention was to create a system that worked like a series of containers into which any exhibit could be placed, while also maintaining the Haffenreffer Museum identity. How well does the system work? Initial feedback has been positive but time will tell. Success will depend on both the strength of the systems design and how consistently it is implemented.
Mark Foster and Erin Wells are principals of Erin Wells Design, Somerville, Massachusetts.
Exhibits
On a hot August day, Steve Lubar, Kevin Smith, and I mounted the narrow staircase to the John Brown House attic, led by RIHS curator Kirsten Hammerstrom. We did not know what to expect and could not believe the rich collection we found there. We were transported to a grandmothers cluttered attic of heirlooms, yet everything was clean, in acid-free boxes, and already cataloged a dream come true! Anyone who has ventured into a museum storage space knows the excitement we felt history surrounding us, breathing on us. Then, just as Roger Williams had done nearly four centuries earlier, the exhibit crossed boundaries. We borrowed objects and images from all over the state, including the Newport Historical Society, the Greene Farm Archaeology Project (Warwick), the Cocumscussoc Association (Wickford), the Rhode
Imported tastes and pleasures were part of everyones lives in the first century, seen here in a coral-tipped baby rattle, silk and linen clad doll, and Imari-style jar.
of the states most valued colonial European objects, a more incisive and inclusive historical narrative emerged one closer to Roger Williams vision for Rhode Island.
Nature knows no difference between Europe and Americans in blood, birth, bodies &c. God having of one blood made all mankind.
Roger Williams We organized the exhibit around daily activities: spirituality, commerce, domestic work, pleasures of life, and war. This is not unlike the organization of Roger Williams 1642 book The Key into the Language of America. But in the exhibit, all people present in Rhode Islands first century become subjects for study, not just the Native Americans. The life ways the customes, manners, and worships of The Keys subtitle of the Dutch, English, Narragansett, Wampanoag, Africans, and French are present throughout the exhibit space, representing the distinct traditions as well as hybrid adaptive strategies that gave character to Rhode Islands 17th and early 18th centuries. Each exhibit case exemplifies how everyday technologies converged as all early Rhode Island peoples shared in the use of flintlock muskets, metal cook pots, clay pipes and American tobacco, shell trade beads called wampum, corn, deerskin clothing, and reed basketry. We did not want to whitewash painful moments in this history, such as King Philips War and slavery, nor overlook the lived proximity and shared endeavors of diverse settlements, regardless of identity and group affiliation. This became the problematic
Tobacco and the bear were sacred in Native American spirituality, beliefs that coexisted with many faiths in early Rhode Island but have been overshadowed by Protestant worships.
Island School of Design Museum of Art, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Met School, as well as engaging the participation of Narragansett and Wampanoag tribal members. By placing together in one gallery space a selection from the rich Native American collection of the Haffenreffer with some
into hierarchies. (We use masks as part of our logo, for just this reason.) We chose masks to tell the story of how artifacts enter the museum. We have examples of archaeology (Mayan), ethnographic field collecting (Cashinaua), purchase from contemporary artists (Haida), and purchase on the open market (Kom).
Facing the Museum brings faces to the museum, puts a human face on museum history, and suggests ways that museums might face their own history.
of the exhibit design: to bring everyone together in the full breadth of exchange, conflict, and cultural sharing. Domestic animals introduced by the English, for example, created strife among the colonists, and even more so in their relations with Native Americans. Within a short period of time, however, members of each of the groups owned livestock and each contributed to building the iconic stone walls of Rhode Islands landscape, especially the Native Americans.
In memory of those hard labours in making stone fences (Daniel Gookin, 1674), we invited Robin Spears, a Narragansett stone mason, to erect a small wall on the grounds of Manning Hall for the exhibits opening day, which coincided with the universitys Family Weekend. A large crowd of parents and students were drawn to the work, asked questions, and visited the exhibit, where Narragansett flute players greeted them. Historical contact was but a moment; learning to live together despite cherished differences is ongoing, as noted on the exhibits introductory panel.
Caroline Frank, a visiting lecturer in American studies, is the author of Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America (University of Chicago Press, 2012). The catalog for this exhibition is available as a PDF on the museums website.
A flintlock musket, owned by Roger Williams son, and a King Philips War era map represent the important place of violent conflict in the colonys first century.
I use the theme of origin stories to organize the exhibition. Origin stories not only refer to traditional tribal myths and legends referenced by recurring motifs. They also encompass academic and popular stories regarding where objects come from and narratives of creation and inspiration told by artists for individual pieces. These diverse stories shape and reflect social values and are often contested in struggles surrounding identity and authority.
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Taoist Gods from China includes a touchscreen interactive designed by computer science undergraduates Yudi Fu and Alex Hill.
consider Native Northwest Coast artists the authorities on authenticity. They specify that unlike factory made souvenirs, real totem poles, regardless of size, are those made by master carvers and their apprentices who follow the symbolic rules that have traditionally given totem poles meaning. In our exhibit, we found that anthropological collections can offer more than authenticity in such histories of creativity, connection, and transformation.
Emily Button, a PhD student in anthropology, and Jonathan Olly, a PhD student in American studies, were museum proctors this year.
Crafting, continued Like legends of tribal origin, stories told about indigenous material culture not only tell us how specific things came into being, but also offer insight into values and perceptions of identities past and present. These objects, though differing in their context of creation, illustrate continuity with traditional motifs and beliefs while allowing and even celebrating the creative re-crafting and re-telling of traditional stories and meanings.
friends with his tutor, who presented him with the robe as a gift when the Villalobos and other American gunboats retreated to Shanghai in May of 1927. His daughter, Diana J. Baker, Brown 56, donated the robe to the museum in 1999.
CultureLab
Steven Lubar
The museums most important initiative this year is CultureLab, a combination open storage and hands-on teaching space.
CultureLab
How can we make collections more easily available to faculty and students? How can we take advantage of the enthusiasm thats so obvious when students visit museum storage? How can we offer visitors and researchers an inside look at how museums work? How can we make it easier for visitors to learn from collections? The answer to these questions is CultureLab. Its visible storage with a mission. Objects related to courses are made available for display. In the center of the space theres a table that serves as a classroom for seminars, a place for students and the public to examine artifacts, and for staff to undertake museum work usually hidden behind the scenes. A lab bench holds a microscope and other tools that
Objects for use in courses on automobiles and pre-Columbian archaeology on display in CultureLab
allow for close looking at objects. A computer allows exploration of the museums databases and images. Here are some of the ways we use CultureLab now: Objects for classes. Providing artifacts for faculty and students to use in their courses is the most important part of the CultureLab program. This semester, several hundred artifacts for six courses are available. Some faculty bring their classes to CultureLab once or twice, others almost every class session. Some classes meet exclusively in CultureLab. Faculty have devised a variety of assignments for their students, including drawing, comparisons, and exhibitions. Hands-on projects for museum visitors. The museum has a long tradition of working with school groups in programs, and some of the exercises from these programs have been repurposed as hands-on
Working in CultureLab
Allison Grosso
The CultureLab has been an enriching addition to the museum, allowing for a much more interactive and appealing experience with the collections on display. Being able to handle objects changes the entire dynamic of the museum when the item leaves its sterile glass case it becomes a living object. Touching objects helps to break down the sense of foreignness often engendered by the traditional museum setting. The selection of items by professors for their classes facilitates visitors engagement with the collection, inviting curiosity by offering a framework within which to start asking questions. For example, in my time working in the lab, my own understanding of the concept of currency has been augmented looking at the objects and by looking through the books on the shelves. The CultureLab fosters discourse on the ways that the museum mediates our relationship with the items it displays.
Allison Grosso, a CultureLab Assistant, is a senior in the Brown/RISD dual degree program, studying painting at RISD and anthropology at Brown.
TEACHING IN CULTURELAB
In Spring 2012 I taught a course in the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World titled: Cold Hard Cash: A Materiality of Money in Ancient and Modern Finance. I was asked to teach this course long before I had any idea that the collections of the museum included hundreds of relevant objects, traditional currencies (e.g., cowrie shells, wampum shells, metal rings) from all corners of the globe. Soon after my first visit to Bristol and discovery of this remarkable collection of currencies, museum staff asked if I would be interested in using CultureLab as a teaching forum. As an archaeologist I have long enjoyed teaching with objects and I jumped at the opportunity. The course used anthropological and historical approaches as ways to offer
time depth, cross-cultural comparison and insight into our own troubled financial systems. Through numerous ancient, historical, ethnographic and modern case studies, the course explored how specific kinds of objects, materials, and non-materials can be invested with financial value. Students from a wide range of academic backgrounds enrolled in this course: some were majoring in the ancient world, others in business-related subjects. Together with staff from the museum I co-curated a CultureLab teaching collection of about 300 traditional currencies from the Haffenreffer Museum and several examples of ancient Greek and Roman coinage from the Joukowsky Institute. The students engaged with CultureLab objects in two forums: in class, where object
handling complemented my lectures, and through a final class project. Student feedback on CultureLab was overwhelmingly positive. Seeing and handling relevant objects enhanced their learning experience on many levels. Students also commented on the helpfulness and friendliness of the CultureLab staff. CultureLab is an excellent initiative and my students and I would like to take this opportunity to thank the staff of the museum for facilitating this memorable learning experience.
Christoph Bachhuber is a postdoctoral fellow in the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World.
activities aimed at family visitors. Reconstruct a ceramic pot from sherds. Identify a projectile point by using a step-by-step procedure. Small exhibits. Our storage shelves can also serve as quick-and-simple spaces for student exhibit projects. A single 3-foot shelf makes for an ideal class exhibit assignment: a few objects and a label. A shelf unit of five 3-foot shelves makes a good place for a class exhibit, or an exhibit curated by the Haffenreffer student group. Cataloging in public. One of the goals of CultureLab is to open up the museums behind-the-scenes work to the public. Cataloging may seem dull, but it can serve as an educational opportunity: talk to the curator about his or her work. Curators and students catalog for a few hours a week in CultureLab. A sign invites visitors to ask questions. If there are few visitors, the cataloging work gets done. If there are many, its a public program!
The increased accessibility to artifacts expands the possibilities for close encounters with objects. A study for the Harvard Art Museum found that in study centers, visitor learning is a matter of interaction and engagement, rather than the absorption of information. We look forward to CultureLab fostering opportunities for critical thinking and reflection that complement traditional gallery experiences.
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cigar case decorated with flowers embroidered in moose hair, a Teton Dakota beaded and quilled pipe bag, a pair of bright red quilled moccasins, with century-old soil still crusted to the soles. Others were ominous, male-crafted objects meant to demonstrate the dangerous leanings of this doomed race: A pair of grim faced Penobscot root clubs, a Cree tomahawk, a Fox gunstock war club, a Plains slungshot club. This extinction never occurred, much to the relief of this indigenous professor, and so we next turned to the role that Native people have begun to play in the conservation and display of their cultural objects
Elizabeth Hoover is assistant professor in ethnic studies and American studies and a faculty curator at the Haffenreffer Museum.
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Luristan Bronzes
Mge Durusu-Tanrver
As a survey archaeologist, I could never expect to stumble upon many artifacts dating to the 1st millennium BCE while working through surface collections. But as the Joukowsky Institute proctor for the Haffenreffer Museum, I was handed a box of Luristan bronzes. My task: catalog them, document them, get to know them.
Luristan bronzes are a well-known and welldistributed corpus of metal artifacts from western Iran. They were first acquired by museums during the mid-19th century. Since then, there have been many systematic archaeological excavations in Iran, where these objects have been found in their original contexts, giving us better data about the dating, provenance and functions of these metal artifacts. The small corpus of bronzes in the Haffenreffer collection was donated by Thomas Hesslein. There are twenty-one items in total, containing several types of artifacts. There are cast animal pendants, pierced towards their center, to be worn on the neck. A significant artifact is an ornamental bell, with
Collections
Examining a large amulet in the shape of a horse from Luristan, Iran, 1st millennium BCE.
a loose pellet inside, which would be fastened on top of a pole on a chariot, to ring while the chariot was on the move. Bracelets are an important component of Luristan bronze collections, and we have two noteworthy examples. One is a ring bracelet with two snake head finials. The other is a decorated bracelet of sheet metal, incised with palmette leaves and geometrical designs. The Haffenreffer collection of Luristan bronzes is now fully documented, photographed and in some cases, drawn. The next step we envision is X-ray fluorescence analysis, to help us answer important questions of authenticity and provenance.
Mge Durusu-Tanrver is a doctoral student in the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World.
Anna Ghublikian and Mara Quintero are graduate students in Brown's public humanities program.
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New Acquisitions
Thierry Gentis
The museum continues to build its collections through gifts and through its support of ethnographic field work. 348 objects were accessioned this year. Museums balance two considerations in collecting. They build on strengths, acquiring objects that allow contrasts and comparisons. This kind of collection attracts researchers and can lead to in-depth exhibitions. And they fill gaps. This brings into the collection areas of the world, or types of objects, that we dont have. Gapfilling collections are good for surveys and for supporting a range of classes. Both types enhance the museum's pedagogical mission. Some of the most important gifts this year: Ten North American Indian items, from the plains and subarctic regions, collected by Charles Ewing, who was appointed as the first Catholic Commissioner for Indian Missions in 1873. Donated by the Ewing Family. Four Pueblo ceramics, collected by Minnie Walkley Ellinwood in the early twentieth century. Donated by Virginia A. Williamson. Twenty-three Pre-Columbian objects, including two Olmec ceramics, a figurine and a head from a figure, as well as a rare Olmec stone bowl; two charming Huastec figurines. Donated by Alan and Marianne Schwartz and an anonymous donor. The museum also acquires artifacts through its support of Brown students, faculty and researchers working around the world. The museums collecting grants not only build the collections, but also support Brown research. This year we supported two researchers whose fieldwork fills significant gaps in the museums collections: Christy Delair, a graduate student in Browns anthropology department, purchased handicrafts expressive of traditional art revivals among Taiwans native communities. This collection is currently on view in Crafting Origins: Creativity and Continuity in Indigenous Taiwan. Katherine Smith, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of Africana studies and the history of art and architecture, acquired Haitian Vodou material from Vodou practitioners this summer. She documented each objects history through recorded interviews and photographed them in situ. Every object entering the museums collections is reviewed by the museums Collections Committee to determine its long-term value to the museum and the university, and to ensure that the collection meets foreign, international and domestic laws.
1. Cheyenne pipe bag. The Charles Ewing Collection. Gift of the Ewing family. 2. Subarctic shirt. The Charles Ewing Collection. Gift of the Ewing family. 3. Asante figure of Sasabonsam. Gift of Anna Cooper. Heath in Honor of Dr. Marina Kuperman-Beade. 4. Vodou bottle of Bosou Trois Corne from the altar of Houngan Nesly in Haiti. Field collection by Katherine Smith. 5. Acoma olla. Gift of Virginia A Williamson. 6. Colima standing figure, Mexico. Anonymous gift.
Programs
needs of a classroom from a classroom; how to manage students; how to communicate effectively; and how to remain relevant to the students and their environment. We have also learned to translate our knowledge to a specific audience. Sixth graders who take part in this program learn to use materials as a way to analyze the world. Primary resources are no longer bound to books, but can be found in objects that tell stories of human experiences. Teachers and students are introduced to archaeological objects as resources, and museums as creative spaces to learn.
Think Like an Archaeologist, now in its third year, includes in-classroom experience sessions to introduce basic archaeological concepts, and a visit to the Haffenreffer and the RISD Museum. The program introduces the multi-faceted world of archaeological work, including the themes of teamwork, close observation, and pattern recognition.
Teaching in this program has informed our public humanities studies. We have learned about the
Jessica Unger and Alexandra Goodman are MA students in Brown's public humanities program.
We introduced the students to a museum artifact, and asked them to think deeply about it. The students enjoyed the exercise, and especially seemed to appreciate the opportunity to build off of some of their previous knowledge. But the experience was not educational only for the sixth grade participants. We were interested in analyzing how the success of thinking routines is affected by the size of the group working together, and so we structured our experiment by looking at the different answers produced by individuals, pairs, and large groups of approximately fifteen students. After collecting data from over one hundred students, we determined that even though the number of responses dropped off with increases in group size, the quality of the answers produced increased with larger group sizes. Its clear that social learning plays a significant role in the educational experience of field trips. We hope to publish the results of our research, to share with a broader audience. It will also be immediately useful as we consider next years Haffenreffers programs.
Our experiment was structured around the idea of a thinking routine, a concept invented by Harvards Project Zero museum education program. Thinking routines were developed to stimulate thinking in a museum environment, allowing individuals to create their own educational experiences. The thinking routine we employed was one called Think, Puzzle, Explore, a routine that works best with students who have background knowledge on a subject. In a series of three discrete phases, students are first asked to think about what they already know about the subject, to puzzle about what else they would like to know, and finally, to explore the ways that they might learn more about the subject.
Anna Wada, Sarah Reusch, and Jessica Unger are MA students in Browns in public humanities program.
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Public Programs
Geralyn Ducady
FALL SEMESTER SPRING SEMESTER
The museum partnered with the Rhode Island Historical Society on a series of public programs to celebrate the 375th anniversary of the founding of Providence and complement our Rhode Island Begins exhibit.
The museum collaborated with Browns Year of China on two exhibits and several programs:
A Chinese Lantern Festival Gallery walking tour of exhibits at the John Hay Library, the David Winton Bell Gallery, and the museum. Christy DeLair and Thierry Gentis answered visitors questions about the exhibits they curated. With the co-sponsorship of the Joukowsky Institute, Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University spoke about his archaeological work in China, documenting evidence of early agricultural activities.
For this years Barbara Greenwald Memorial Arts Program, Robin Spears & Sons Masonry of the Narragansett Tribe, visited the museum and built a stone wall as an outdoor extension of the Rhode Island Begins exhibit. During the building demonstration, members of the Student Group organized family activities, and Narragansett flautists Ridge E. Spears and Christian Hopkins played inside the museum. Diana Loren (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University) spoke about her research into the Harvard Indian College and shared evidence of daily life from archaeological excavations done at the site of the old college. Caroline Frank, visiting lecturer and curator of Rhode Island Begins, discussed the research that went into the exhibit. She also shared her experiences excavating the daily lives of the peoples and cultures of early Rhode Island. For the Jane Powell Dwyer Memorial Lecture, Joshua Bell of the National Museum of Natural History talked about his work with the Iai communities in the Purari Delta area of Papua New Guinea and their land struggles with logging and oil exploration.
Christy DeLair shows images of innovative beads that draw on traditional indigenous Taiwanese designs and stories.
Christy DeLair, Ph.D. student in anthropology and curator of Crafting Origins: Creativity and Continuity in Indigenous Taiwan, shared her experiences working with contemporary indigenous craftspeople in Taiwan, the creation of new crafts traditions in material, design, and method, and collecting these crafts for the museum collections. A gallery walk of the sister Taoist exhibits at the RISD Museum and the Haffenreffer Museum. Thierry Gentis lead the tour of Taoist Gods from China: Ceremonial Paintings of the Mien.
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Culture CaraVan
Geralyn Ducady
The Culture CaraVan program is still going strong. Kathy Silvia, the museums education coordinator, takes eight experiential programs to schools in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts. Favorites include Native People of Southeastern New England, Dig It!: Discovering Archaeology, and Culture Connect: Experience the Cultures of the World. In times of strict budgets that limit school field trips, teachers look to the CaraVan to bring hands-on educational experiences to the classroom. In addition to our core K-12 classrooms, Kathy has visited preschools, senior centers and retirement homes, and developed and taught after-school programs for the Colt Andrews School in Bristol. To learn more about our Culture CaraVan program request a brochure or check the museums website.
Christoph Bachhuber, postdoctoral fellow in archaeology, talked about the way his students used objects in CultureLab for his course Cold, Hard, Cash: The Materiality of Money in Ancient and Modern Finance. Elizabeth Hoover, professor of American studies and ethnic studies, spoke about her experience using the CultureLab with her class Thawing the Frozen Indian: American Indian Museum Representation. Her class met in the CultureLab so her students could explore objects from the museums collections.
Margot Schevill shows off some of her collection of Mayan textiles after her lecture.
For the Edward G. and Barbara A. Hail Lecture, Margot Schevill talked about her more than thirtyyear relationship with a Maya family with whom she studied backstrap weaving. A former Brown student and Haffenreffer curator, Schevill recently donated a significant collection of Guatemalan textiles, some of which will be displayed in an exhibition in May. For the first Shepard Krech III Lecture, Shepard Krech III, professor emeritus of anthropology and former director of the museum, returned to Brown to discuss the results of a research project on folk ornithology. Museum members went on a field trip to the Peabody Essex Museum to see Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art. The PEM borrowed one of the Museums cradleboards for display in this exhibition. With the opening of the new CultureLab, we hosted a series of gallery talks featuring faculty and students who use the new space:
Mge Durusu-Tanrver, doctoral student at the Joukowsky Institute and proctor at the museum, showcased the collection of first-millennium BCE Luristan objects she worked on in CultureLab this semester. Laura Berman and Allison Iarocci talked about the student exhibit Shoes have Soul, curated by members of the Haffenreffer Museum Student Group and featured in CultureLab.
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Japanese Children's Day with traditional crafts and activities. We want to thank Geralyn Ducady, Tony Belz, Thierry Gentis, Nathan Arndt and Steve Lubar for their guidance and assistance. The HMSG is proud to be an officially recognized student group and excited to further engage undergrads across campus.
Hannah Sisk 13 and Ben Jones 13 are chairs of the HMSG. Hannah is a junior concentrating in Near Eastern archaeology. Ben is a junior Egyptology and archaeology concentrator. Both have been involved with the Haffenreffer museum since their freshman year.
wampum necklaces and playing the game of hubbub. HMSG member Laura Berman 14 made traditional johnny cakes that were enjoyed by all. We have several projects underway this spring. Our exhibits committee is preparing to install an exhibition on shoes from around the world. Our programs committee will be hosting an open house and gallery talk for the newly-admitted class of 2016, and were planning a family event at the Brown Bookstore for the bookstores Cub Explorer program to celebrate
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Rags to Riches: An Archaeological Study of Textiles and Gender in Iceland from AD 874 to 1800
Michle Hayeur Smith
Research
An NSF-supported research project at the museum explores the role of women in Iceland through archaeological textiles to help establish an archaeology of gender in the North Atlantic.
In Iceland, women were the main producers of cloth, transforming raw wool into thread and thread into cloth. Some of this cloth went to clothe Icelandic households, but woollen cloth was also medieval Icelands main export product. By the 11th century it had become Icelands main form of currency, used to pay rents, tributes, and tithes. By the 13th century, its production was standardized and heavily regulated. Medieval documents provide a very abstract and partial glimpse of this industry. But the archaeological record can tell us much more. Supported by a grant from the National Science Foundations Arctic Social Sciences program, I am conducting research on curated archaeological textile collections from Iceland to learn more about this work. The focus of my research is an in-depth analysis of archaeologically recovered textiles from sites dating from the Viking Age (AD 870-1050) through the late 18th century. I hope to understand the roles of women in working wool and weaving cloth, and through this, to develop an archaeology of gender in the North Atlantic. This project will help us understand how people from a homogenous, isolated and culturally pristine society adapted and fared through centuries of hardship, environmental degradation and climate change, shedding light on the web that wove women, households, Iceland, and medieval Europe together. I am working with colleagues from across the North Atlantic region to rehabilitate long-neglected collections of textile scraps from previously excavated archaeological sites to reconstruct not only items of clothing but also the processes by which textiles were made, the standards to which they were made, and the uses to which they were put. With my students, I have begun to identify and to reconstruct elements of clothing from medieval Iceland, linking them to changing styles in continental Europe, Scandinavia, and Greenland. By painstakingly counting the threads in scraps of cloth, we can document changes in how Icelandic cloth was made and, critically, define through archaeological data the degree to which Icelands women weavers
The inside of a tortoise brooch from from a Viking Age burial site at Gamla Berjanes, Iceland, reveals the type of cloth it was pinned to.
shifted from producing cloth for diverse household needs to making standardized cloth as currency, literally making money on their looms. We are also documenting changes in the ways that women produced cloth for household needs as the climate changed from temperate to frigid during the Little Ice Age (1500-1800). Several Brown University students are participating in this work. Susan Ortega worked with me on a project comparing Icelandic textiles of the 10th-15th centuries with ancient Peruvian textiles of the same age in the Haffenreffers collections. Anya Eber, a student in the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, is currently doing an independent study on dress practices from AD 1450-1800, reconstructing garments from samples and patterns collected through this project a project that will result in a museum exhibit this year. Laura Leddy, a junior, will work on collections from the 17th to the 19th century, exploring Icelands integration into the industrial world.
Museum Research Associate Michle Hayeur Smith, principal investigator for the NSF grant on Icelandic textiles, is an archaeologist with experience in Iceland and North America. Her research interests are in material culture, dress (textiles, jewellery), the body, and gender.
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An Alaskan Homecoming
Kevin Smith
In 1958, William Simmons, then an undergraduate at Brown, was working under the direction of the Museums first director, J. Louis Giddings, documenting ancient settlements on ancient beach ridges in what is now Cape Krusenstern National Monument in northwestern Alaska. There he found a small settlement containing the first traces of what Giddings and Douglas Anderson termed the Old Whaling Culture. At roughly 3,500 years old, this has long been thought to provide the earliest evidence for the whale hunting by humans in the region. The origins of these people and their historic connections with other cultures in the Bering Strait region remain enigmatic. Subsequent researchers have questioned Giddings interpretations of the site, suggesting that it may contain deeply buried layers representing a complex history of Old Whaling occupations there. Last summer, Christopher Wolff, an Assistant Professor at SUNY-Plattsburgh and Museum Research Associate of the Haffenreffer, Thomas Urban (Brown alumnus), and Luke Brown (an undergraduate student from SUNY-Plattsburgh) revisited the site with funding from a National Science Foundation grant administered through the Haffenreffer. They used geophysical methods to search for underlying deposits that could clarify the occupational history of the Old Whaling site. Their work suggests that the complex geological history of the beach ridge on which the site sits may account for the apparent presence of deeper cultural deposits there, supporting the original interpretations of Giddings, Anderson, and Simmons.
The 2012 field camp on Cape Krusenstern, Alaska. Most of the collections rehoused by Zoe Weiss in the museum's Circumpolar Lab came from Haffenreffer Museum excavations at Cape Krusenstern in the 1950s and 1960s.
Kevin Smith is Deputy Director and Chief Curator and an arctic archaeologist with fieldwork and publications in Alaska, Iceland, and subarctic Canada.
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Friends Board
Jeffrey Schreck President Susan Hardy Vice President Diana Johnson Treasurer Elizabeth Johnson Secretary Susan Alcock Peter Allen Edith Andrews Gina Borromeo Kristine M. Bovy Bolaji Campbell Robert Emlen David Haffenreffer Rudolf F. Haffenreffer Barbara Hail
Alice Houston Steven Lubar Ex Officio Catherine Lutz Chair, Department of Anthropology Sylvia Moubayed Mark Schlissel Provost Kevin Smith Ex Officio Loren Spears Patricia V. Symonds
Museum Staff
Alexandra Allardt Conservation Consultant Douglas Anderson Director, Circumpolar Lab Nathan Arndt Curatorial Assistant Anthony M. Belz Museum Guard/Greeter Emily Button Proctor Sarah Craft Proctor Geralyn Ducady Curator of Education/Programs Carol Dutton Office Manager Muge Durusu-Tanrover Proctor Thierry Gentis Curator Rip Gerry Exhibit Preparator/Storage Manager/Photo Archivist Anna Ghublikian Collections Assistant
Alexandra Goodman Outreach Intern Barbara A. Hail Research Associate/ Curator Emerita Steven Lubar Director Jonathan Olly Proctor Rod Pacheco Property Manager Mara D. Quintero Collections Intern Kathy Silvia Outreach Coordinator Kevin Smith Deputy Director/Chief Curator Michle Hayeur Smith Museum Research Associate Emily Stokes-Rees Post-Doctoral Fellow Jessica Unger Outreach Intern Christopher Wolff Museum Research Associate
Back cover: Left top: Pair of Pre-Columbian Huastec female figures, anonymous donation; bottom: Photograph of Paiwan weaver in the Crafting Origin exhibition. Center: Carving Culture on the North West Coast: The Totem Pole exhibition at the Rockefeller Library. Right top: Imperial dragon robe, China, Gift of Diana J. Baker Brown 56; bottom: Sixth-graders in Manning Hall attending Think Like an Archaeologist program.
Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology Brown University P.O. Box 1965 Providence, RI 02912 brown.edu/Haffenreffer