Arizona State Museum | |
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General information | |
Type | Museum |
Location | Tucson, Arizona, USA |
Opened | 1893 |
Owner | The University of Arizona |
The Arizona State Museum (ASM), founded in 1893, was originally a repository for the collection and protection of archaeological resources. Today, however, ASM stores artifacts, exhibits them and provides education and research opportunities. It was formed by authority of the Arizona Territorial Legislature. The museum is operated by the University of Arizona, and is located on the university campus in Tucson. [1]
Native peoples have existed in the North American continent for more than ten millennia. ASM investigates habitations, lifeways, art and communication in which these peoples in the Southwest engaged. [2]
Museum staff investigate archaeological sites of past occupiers of North America to discover how people lived, what they ate, what they wore and how they created their art. These people lived day-to-day, created homesites and villages that, in many cases, have crumbled or been destroyed by natural forces. [3] [4] [5] [6]
An early and significant director of the museum, Emil W. Haury, conducted numerous archaeological excavations in the Southwest and taught students and others about his methods and discoveries. [7]
ASM holds artifacts created by cultures from the past as well as those presently active. The types of artifacts include pottery, jewelry, baskets, textiles and clothing. Archaeological objects were unearthed during excavations by museum staff and others. Ethnological items (those not acquired from excavation) have been donated by Native American tribes, acquired from individuals, as well as purchased by ASM.
Furthermore, the Arizona State Museum possesses a vast photographic collection, containing more than 350,000 prints, negatives, and transparencies illustrating the prehistory and ethnology of the American Southwest and northern Mexico (ASM Photographic Collection).. This number of photographic materials does not include the growing digital collection that the museum continues to develop. Noteworthy photographers in this collection includes Forman Hanna, Emil Haury, Helga Teiwes, and Greenville Goodwin.
ASM continuously exhibits the objects it holds. A list of current and upcoming exhibits can be found here: https://statemuseum.arizona.edu/exhibits
In addition to engaging university students through classroom, laboratory, and field instruction, ASM offers a full calendar of public programs celebrating the ancient indigenous and enduring Native cultures of the region, sharing its expertise and collections with visitors of all ages through exhibits, school programs, lectures, hands-on activities, workshops, and travel tours. [8]
Students of archaeology, anthropology, art, design and other areas of investigation work with ASM personnel to become better acquainted with materials, techniques and objects from ASM’s collections. Some students participate in archaeological excavations conducted by the museum.
The Office of Ethnohistorical Research (OER) conducts research on the peoples of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, offering access to Spanish and Mexican documents and scholarly publications. It also provides a number of resources for those wishing to conduct research on the area. The OER Library holds over 8,000 sources of information, including secondary works, reference materials, indexes to major archival collections, maps, ephemera, and guides to paleography and translation. Additionally, OER also maintains the Documentary Relations of the Southwest (DRSW), an online index of over 17,000 documents generated during the Spanish colonial period. The documents cover a broad range of civil, religious, military, and ecological issues that examine the relationships between Native Americans, Spanish colonists, Catholic missionaries, and the Spanish colonial administration. [9]
AZSITE maintains and updates a geodatabase of cultural sites and surveys that may be accessed by those involved in related activities. This allows investigators to locate information without having to physically visit widely separated and, perhaps, little-known sites. There are hundreds of these sites in Arizona. [10]
The Arizona State Museum’s library and archives is a research collection open to the public specializing in southwestern United States and northern Mexico archaeology, ethnology, ethnohistory, and material culture, as well as American Indian and museum studies. The library holds over 100,000 monographs and journals, many of which are rare titles, including original research data and manuscripts, archaeological reports on southwest-based field work, grey literature, and ephemera. The archive includes manuscripts, original research data, maps, correspondence, field notes, scrapbooks, diaries, drawings, oral histories, and sound recordings. [11]
Each type of artifact held by ASM must be contained in an area that is protected from the damaging effects of humidity, heat and insects. ASM is home to the world’s largest collection of Southwest Indian pottery housed in a state-of-the-art vault so as to protect its 20,000 vessels from the damage suffered in the past. [12] [13]
Arizona State Museum administers the Arizona Antiquities Act and state laws concerning the discovery of human remains. In fulfillment of these responsibilities, ASM issues permits for archaeological work on state lands (lands owned or controlled by Arizona or any agent of Arizona), negotiates the disposition of archaeological human remains, maintains an archaeological site file, and provides repository services for the curation of archaeological collections , [14] , [15] [16]
The museum is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. [17]
ASM has ongoing relations and communications with tribal members across the Southwest. This involves staff visits to tribal communities, visits to ASM by tribal members to evaluate objects, and cooperation with ASM staff during excavations. ASM also administers federal law dealing with return of human remains, sacred objects, funerary objects and objects of cultural patrimony. [18] [19]
The museum has had seven directors since its founding:
Penn Museum, formerly known as The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, is an archaeology and anthropology museum at the University of Pennsylvania. It is located on Penn's campus in the University City neighborhood of Philadelphia, at the intersection of 33rd and South Streets. Housing over 1.3 million artifacts, the museum features one of the most comprehensive collections of middle and near-eastern art in the world.
Nampeyo was a Hopi-Tewa potter who lived on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona. Her Tewa name was also spelled Num-pa-yu, meaning "snake that does not bite". Her name is also cited as "Nung-beh-yong," Tewa for Sand Snake.
Mogollon culture is an archaeological culture of Native American peoples from Southern New Mexico and Arizona, Northern Sonora and Chihuahua, and Western Texas. The northern part of this region is Oasisamerica, while the southern span of the Mogollon culture is known as Aridoamerica.
The Hohokam Pima National Monument is an ancient Hohokam village within the Gila River Indian Community, near present-day Sacaton, Arizona. The monument features the archaeological site Snaketown 30 miles (48 km) southeast of Phoenix, Arizona, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964. The area was further protected by declaring it a national monument in 1972, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
Alfred Vincent Kidder was an American archaeologist considered the foremost of the southwestern United States and Mesoamerica during the first half of the 20th century. He saw a disciplined system of archaeological techniques as a means to extend the principles of anthropology into the prehistoric past and so was the originator of the first comprehensive, systematic approach to North American archaeology.
The Amerind Foundation is a museum and research facility dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of Native American cultures and their histories. Its facilities are located near the village of Dragoon in Cochise County, Arizona, about 65 miles east of Tucson in Texas Canyon.
Moundville Archaeological Site, also known as the Moundville Archaeological Park, is a Mississippian culture archaeological site on the Black Warrior River in Hale County, near the modern city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Extensive archaeological investigation has shown that the site was the political and ceremonial center of a regionally organized Mississippian culture chiefdom polity between the 11th and 16th centuries. The archaeological park portion of the site is administered by the University of Alabama Museums and encompasses 185 acres (75 ha), consisting of 29 platform mounds around a rectangular plaza.
The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology is a museum affiliated with Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1866, the Peabody Museum is one of the oldest and largest museums focusing on anthropological material, with particular focus on the ethnography and archaeology of the Americas. The museum is caretaker to over 1.2 million objects, some 900 feet (270 m) of documents, 2,000 maps and site plans, and approximately 500,000 photographs. The museum is located at Divinity Avenue on the Harvard University campus. The museum is one of the four Harvard Museums of Science and Culture open to the public.
Harold Sterling Gladwin (1883–1983) was an American archaeologist, anthropologist, and stockbroker.
Emil Walter "Doc" Haury was an influential archaeologist who specialized in the archaeology of the American Southwest. He is most famous for his work at Snaketown, a Hohokam site in Arizona.
The Gila Pueblo Archaeological Foundation was a research organization which conducted archaeological research in the American Southwest and surrounding areas. It was founded in 1928 in Globe, Arizona, by Harold S. Gladwin and Winifred (McCurdy) Gladwin. It ceased operations in 1950.
The Double Adobe site is an archaeological site in southern Arizona, twelve miles northwest of Douglas in the Whitewater Draw area. In October 1926, just three months after the first human artifact was uncovered at the Folsom site, Byron Cummings, first Head of the Archaeology Department at the University of Arizona, led four students to Whitewater Draw. Discovered by a schoolboy, the Double Adobe site contained the skull of a mammoth overlying a sand layer containing stone artifacts. One of these students was Emil Haury.
Pueblo Grande Ruin and Irrigation Sites are pre-Columbian archaeological sites and ruins, located in Phoenix, Arizona. They include a prehistoric platform mound and irrigation canals. The City of Phoenix manages these resources as the S’edav Va’aki Museum.
The Naco Mammoth Kill Site is an archaeological site in southeast Arizona, 1 mile northwest of Naco in Cochise County. The site was reported to the Arizona State Museum in September 1951 by Marc Navarrete, a local resident, after his father found two Clovis points in Greenbush Draw, while digging out the fossil bones of a mammoth. Emil Haury excavated the Naco mammoth site in April 1952. In only five days, Haury recovered the remains of a Columbian Mammoth in association with 8 Clovis points. The excavator believed the assemblage to date from about 10,000 Before Present. An additional point was found in the arroyo upstream. The Naco site was the first Clovis mammoth kill association to be identified. An additional, unpublished, second excavation occurred in 1953 which doubled the area of the original work and found bones from a 2nd mammoth. In 2020, small charcoal fragments were found adhered to a mammoth bone from the site. AMS radiocarbon dating produced a mean date of 10,985 ± 56 Before Present.
Paul Sidney Martin was an American anthropologist and archaeologist. A lifelong associate of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Martin studied pre-Columbian cultures of the Southwestern United States. He excavated more than a hundred archaeological sites, starting with the groundbreaking seven-season expedition to the Montezuma County, Colorado in 1930–1938. His research passed through three distinct stages: field archaeology of the Anasazi Pueblo cultures of Colorado in the 1930s, studies of the Mogollon culture in 1939–1955 and the New Archaeology studies in 1956–1972. Martin collected more than 585 thousand archaeological artifacts although his own methods of handling these relics were at times destructive and unacceptable even by the standards of his time.
The Tucson artifacts, sometimes called the Tucson Lead Crosses, Tucson Crosses, Silverbell Road artifacts, or Silverbell artifacts, were thirty-one lead objects that Charles E. Manier and his family found in 1924 near Picture Rocks, Arizona, that were initially thought by some to be created by early Mediterranean civilizations that had crossed the Atlantic in the first century, but were later determined to be a hoax.
The Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology, formerly known as the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology, is a learning center and archaeological collection in Andover, Massachusetts. Founded in 1901 through a bequest from Robert Singleton Peabody, 1857 Phillips Academy alumnus, the institute initially held the archaeological materials collected by Peabody from Native American cultures. Peabody's passionate interest in archaeology led him to create the institute at Phillips Academy to encourage young people's interest in the sciences, and to foster respect and appreciation for the Native American peoples who have inhabited that hemisphere for thousands of years.
The Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition occurred between 1886 and 1894 in the American Southwest. Sponsored by Mary Tileston Hemenway, a wealthy widow and philanthropist, the expedition was initially led by Frank Hamilton Cushing, who was replaced in 1889 by Jesse Walter Fewkes. It was considered to be a major scientific archaeological expedition, notable for the discovery of the prehistoric Hohokam culture.
Clara Lee Tanner was an American anthropologist, editor and art historian. She is known for studies of the arts and crafts of American Indians of the Southwest.