Established | 1932 (current location since 1961) |
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Location | University of New Mexico campus, Albuquerque, New Mexico United States |
Coordinates | 35°05′07″N106°37′30″W / 35.0852°N 106.6250°W |
Director | Carla Sinopoli |
Website | maxwellmuseum.unm.edu/ |
The Maxwell Museum of Anthropology is an anthropology museum located on the University of New Mexico campus in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The museum was founded in 1932 as the Museum of Anthropology of the University of New Mexico, becoming the first public museum in Albuquerque. In 1972 it was renamed the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology in honor of philanthropists Dorothy and Gilbert Maxwell.
The museum was established in 1932 as the Museum of Anthropology of the University of New Mexico by Edgar Lee Hewett, an active anthropologist who founded the University's anthropology department four years earlier. The museum was created to house and display the growing collection of artifacts gathered from field schools of archaeological research associated with the UNM Anthropology Department, the School of American Research, and the Museum of New Mexico. [1]
Frank C. Hibben was the first director of the museum and expanded its holdings by collecting archaeological materials from around the world and in trade with other museums. Exhibits were first situated in UNM's Rodey Hall, which was demolished in 1971. The museum moved to Scholes Hall in 1935, then to the current site in 1961. In 1972 a major construction project expanded museum facilities, which was funded by the philanthropists Dorothy and Gilbert Maxwell. [1] The museum was renamed in their honor and since then, it has been recognized as an important regional museum and a nationally known research center.
The museum has five exhibit areas that host permanent and changing exhibits which express the human cultural experience. The Ancestors permanent exhibit traces human evolution over four million years and features life-size models of human ancestors. The People of the Southwest permanent exhibit depicts eleven thousand years of the cultural heritage of the American Southwest and features artifacts from Mimbres, Ancestral Puebloan, and Puebloan cultures, as well as displays on UNM field work in New Mexico, which includes a reconstruction of an excavation at Chaco Canyon. The museum's North Gallery, Bawden Gallery (named after Garth Bawden, museum director 1985-2005), and the Ortiz Center Gathering Space (named for the late Alfonso Ortiz, a noted UNM anthropology professor) host changing exhibits featuring artifacts from the extensive museum collection as well as traveling exhibits. The museum's courtyard featured a 46-foot (14 m)-high totem pole brought to the museum from British Columbia in 1941. [1] The totem pole was restored and is now housed in the lobby of the Anthropology Department's Hibben Center building next to the museum.
The Puebloans, or Pueblo peoples, are Native Americans in the Southwestern United States who share common agricultural, material, and religious practices. Among the currently inhabited Pueblos, Taos, San Ildefonso, Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi are some of the most commonly known. Pueblo people speak languages from four different language families, and each Pueblo is further divided culturally by kinship systems and agricultural practices, although all cultivate varieties of corn (maize).
The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada displays world arts and cultures, in particular works by First Nations of the Pacific Northwest. As well as being a major tourist destination, MOA is a research and teaching museum, where UBC courses in art, anthropology, archaeology, conservation, and museum studies are given. MOA houses close to 50,000 ethnographic objects, as well as 535,000 archaeological objects in its building alone.
Pueblo refers to the settlements and to the Native American tribes of the Pueblo peoples in the Southwestern United States, currently in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. The permanent communities, including some of the oldest continually occupied settlements in the United States, are called pueblos (lowercased).
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. It also is close enough for Drexel University students to walk or take SEPTA transportation services. Housing over 1.3 million artifacts, the museum features one of the most comprehensive collections of Middle and Near-Eastern art in the world.
The Manitou Cliff Dwellings are a privately owned tourist attraction consisting of replica Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings and interpretive exhibits located just west of Colorado Springs, Colorado, on U.S. Highway 24 in Manitou Springs.
Edgar Lee Hewett was an American archaeologist and anthropologist whose focus was the Native American communities of New Mexico and the southwestern United States. He is best known for his role in gaining passage of the Antiquities Act, a pioneering piece of legislation for the conservation movement; as the founder and first director of the Museum of New Mexico; and as the first president of the New Mexico Normal School, now New Mexico Highlands University.
Salmon Ruins is an ancient Chacoan and Pueblo site located in the northwest corner of New Mexico, USA. Salmon was constructed by migrants from Chaco Canyon around 1090 CE, with 275 to 300 original rooms spread across three stories, an elevated tower kiva in its central portion, and a great kiva in its plaza. Subsequent use by local Middle San Juan people resulted in extensive modifications to the original building, with the reuse of hundreds of rooms, division of many of the original large, Chacoan rooms into smaller rooms, and emplacement of more than 20 small kivas into pueblo rooms and plaza areas. The site was occupied by ancient Ancestral Puebloans until the 1280s, when much of the site was destroyed by fire and abandoned. The pueblo is situated on the north bank of the San Juan River, just to the west of the modern town of Bloomfield, New Mexico, and about 45 miles (72 km) north of Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. The site was built on the first alluvial terrace above the San Juan River floodplain.
Pottery Mound was a late prehistoric village on the bank of the Rio Puerco, west of Los Lunas, New Mexico. It was an adobe pueblo most likely occupied between 1350 and 1500. The site is best known for its 17 kivas, which yielded a large number of murals. A 2007 book, New Perspectives on Pottery Mound Pueblo provides a general introduction to the site.
Sandia Cave, also called the Sandia Man Cave, is an archaeological site near Bernalillo, New Mexico, within Cibola National Forest. First discovered and excavated in the 1930s, the site exhibits purported evidence of human use from 9,000 to 11,000 years ago. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1961. The site is open to the public, up a difficult half-mile trail off New Mexico State Road 165.
Frank Cumming Hibben was a well-known archaeologist whose research focused on the U.S. Southwest. As a professor at the University of New Mexico (UNM) and writer of popular books and articles, he inspired many people to study archaeology. He was also controversial, being suspected of scientific fraud during his studies of Paleo-Indian cultures.
Cibola White Ware is a ceramic tradition of Arizona and New Mexico, dating from 1225–1325 CE.
The Canyons of the Ancients Visitor Center and Museum located in Dolores, Colorado, is an archaeological museum of Native American pueblo and hunter-gatherer cultures. Two 12th-century archaeological sites, the Escalante and Dominguez Pueblos, at the center were once home to Ancient Pueblo peoples. The museum's permanent and special exhibits display some of the 3 million mostly Ancestral Puebloan artifacts curated at the facility. The center also houses a public research library, educational resources and a museum shop. Wheelchair-accessible facilities include a picnic area and an interpreted nature and cultural trail.
The University of New Mexico Art Museum is an art museum at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The museum's permanent collection includes nearly 30,000 objects, making it the largest collection of fine art in New Mexico.
Cynthia Irwin-Williams was an archaeologist of the prehistoric American Southwest. She received a B.A. in Anthropology from Radcliffe College in 1957; the next year she received a M.A. in the same field. In 1963 she completed her educational career in Anthropology with a PhD. from Harvard University. Beginning her career in the 1950s, Irwin-Williams was considered a groundbreaker for women in archaeology, like her friend and supporter Hannah Marie Wormington.
Rick Dillingham (1952–1994) was an American ceramic artist, scholar, collector and museum professional best known for his broken pot technique and scholarly publications on Pueblo pottery.
Marta Weigle was an American anthropologist and folklorist.
Laurencita R. Herrera (1912–1984) was a renowned Native American Cochiti Pueblo artist, specializing in traditional Cochiti figurative pottery called storytellers and her pottery vessels. She is of the Herrera family, a renowned family of Pueblo potters in New Mexico, whose work is often found in art collections and art museums. She was an actively making pottery between the 1930s through the 1970s and is known as one of the, "finest Cochiti potters of that era".
Pueblo pottery are ceramic objects made by the Indigenous Pueblo people and their antecedents, the Ancestral Puebloans and Mogollon cultures in the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico. For centuries, pottery has been central to pueblo life as a feature of ceremonial and utilitarian usage. The clay is locally sourced, most frequently handmade, and fired traditionally in an earthen pit. These items take the form of storage jars, canteens, serving bowls, seed jars, and ladles. Some utility wares were undecorated except from simple corrugations or marks made with a stick or fingernail, however many examples for centuries were painted with abstract or representational motifs. Some pueblos made effigy vessels, fetishes or figurines. During modern times, pueblo pottery was produced specifically as an art form to serve an economic function. This role is not dissimilar to prehistoric times when pottery was traded throughout the Southwest, and in historic times after contact with the Spanish colonialists.