Sharing Collections

Part of my motivation in starting this blog was to share a peek of what behind the scenes looked like for a collections person. My favorite things to share are cool objects from the collection, and box making. Because making boxes, or object mounts more generally, is one of my favorite activity. One of my goals, once the collection move was completed, has been to photograph our collection objects and get those photos online, so that you all can see what I get to see everyday, and so that I can learn more about them from people who know more than me! Because I'm always looking to expand my knowledge about the collections.

This past week I've begun uploading some photos to Flickr. Why flickr? It's fairly cheap, easy to get access to, and you can comment on it! Also, I've seen that other museums, like the Magnes Museum have been sharing their collections there. So I've sent out a trial balloon - uploading 408 images of our collection.

Agates from the Bentley Collection
387 photos of beautiful agates.


Baskets from the Collection
An incomplete photoset - it will be expanded as we photograph more of our baskets. But baskets are a wonderful and important aspect of our collection, and we believe that the more we can learn about them, the greater the stories we can tell.


And now, a question: What sort of objects would you like to see from our collection? What interests you most?

And we're back!

We keep ourselves pretty busy around here. There's been a lot going on - new exhibits, learning new techniques, installing a mammoth in the lobby. Yep. Full size mammoth in the lobby. It's awesome.



More content coming over the next weeks.

Photo Friday: Petrified Wood Projectile Point

I've spent a lot of time with archaeological lithics in my life. As an undergraduate, I spent 3.5 years working with and studying lithic debitage. In the collection here, we have about 6000 pieces of chipped stone tools - projectile points and scrapers, mostly. This week I've been photographing some projectile points and processing photos that our intern, Leila, took earlier this month.

I was really struck by the beauty of these tools. They're made from a variety of materials. Around here, you sometimes see projectile points worked from petrified wood. There's quite a bit of petrified wood in the area. There's even a petrified forest nearby (which has a pretty neat museum/interpretive center down the road from it). I think it's just wild how a tree becomes fossilized and then becomes a tool when worked by a skilled craftsperson.

Photo Friday: New Acquisition

Since the Museum of Culture and Environment began running workshops last spring, we've had higher visibility. Over the summer we received three new donations. This piece is one of them. After some delay, we've attached a label to it and it is now fully integrated into the collection.


At the moment, we don't have a great deal of information about piece, except that the owner before the donor may have been a librarian in Peru. Intriguing!

Photo Friday: Outside the Museum

I stepped outside on Tuesday afternoon to get some air and see daylight (occupational hazard of working with collections? Basement or windowless office.). The daylight was exceptionally beautiful - sun from the west, clouds in the east. So I ran back to my office, grabbed the camera and snapped a few photos before the light disappeared.

Photo Friday: Polar Bear Pendant

I skipped ahead out of the lithics this week and took pictures of some of our smaller Arctic type objects. This piece, a carved polar bear head pendant, was probably carved for sale. It's grouped with three other carved for sale type pieces including a napkin ring, a letter opener, and a small seal. I love the heads flanking it on the right and left. Seals, maybe? And also the tongue detail - very red and interesting!

Object History

Unfortunately, we don't have extensive records on many of our objects. Sometimes we don't know if an object was donated to us in a broken state, or if it broke in our care (over the nearly 40 years a museum in some form has existed). So it was really exciting for me to find a contact print documenting the repair of a broken object.


I presume this occurred in the 1970s, when there was a great deal of activity in the collections. You can see that the ceramic figure was in (at least) two pieces, broken right down the middle.


Presumably, an adhesive was applied to the broken edges, and then it was held together. By what look like rubber bands. And then it is all one piece again!


And the repair has held through all the years. You can still see the crack running down the center of the figure.


I've got a large box full of negatives to go through. I wonder what other object stories we'll uncover as we work through those.

Museum history

The museum collections have been with the University for a long time - some were received as long ago as 1953. But the vast majority of the collection I care for was acquired during the early 1970s when the Anthropology Department founded the Museum of Man. Located in Barge Hall on campus, the Museum of Man had displays and supported the museum studies minor.

I recently located some old photos of what I believe were the store rooms in old Barge Hall. It's pretty neat (for me, at least) to see the objects I work with daily in this context. The rooms are pretty small and the objects very crammed, and I'm sure that archival materials at that time were not what they are today. But the collections were cared for in line with the standards of the day. So take a peek at these old photos and see if you recognize anything from the photos I've shared over the past year and a half.

Contruction site tour

Today I had the chance to go on a tour of Dean Hall, which is currently being renovated. It was way cool. I've never been on a construction site like that - I even got to wear a hardhat.

This is the west side, the "back side" of the building.


We then started on the third floor. To get there, we climbed an exterior stairwell. Let it be known that I have a certain nervousness about stairways which open stairs, and about heights, so I got a little anxious climbing this thing. But it is very safe and I did not fall.


When we got to the third floor, we saw footprints in the concrete. Not new ones, but ones from 60 years ago or so when the building was first constructed (or maybe it was built in the 1960s, not sure).


The second and third floor have very cool lounges being constructed in the front of the building - they are going to have an excellent view of the university and be bright and sunny. Right now, however, they are a maze of bars.


Another view from the third floor level, but at the top of an exterior stairwell that we are about to descend.


We descended, went through the 2nd floor which has lots of labs and classrooms, then finally got down to the first floor, which was of interest to me, being where the museum is. For all of that, I only got a couple of photos. This first one is the exhibition space. Or will be, eventually:


We got into where the collections space will be and I snapped a photo of what will be the archives room:


That doorway you see is from the previous life of Dean Hall. It will be a wall in the future. The tour was very cool. For the past several months I've been looking at the plans of the museum, trying to visualize what sort of tables and shelves should go in there and how it will look. So now I've seen the space, and let me tell you, it looks big. We are going to have so many shelves to put things on. It's going to be excellent. I am especially excited about having a unified space - right now museum spaces are spread out on the first floor of the current building, and we need to navigate public hallways to move between spaces. If I get back into the building before it's finished, I am sure I will take more photos and keep you updated.

These boots were made for walking....

but now they're in a museum so no one is allowed to use them for walking, running, dancing, or even hanging out on the couch watching tv. And they're not boots, really, they're moccasins.

Over the past couple weeks I spent some time rehousing the moccasin collection. We have 17.5 pairs of moccasins, ranging from so tiny that they must be for a doll to mens sizes, and 1 pair of child's mukluks. Some of them were pretty much flat after being in storage for years (you know how a light canvas sneaker flops over? It's kind of like that. Shoes don't always hold their shape.), while others had some paper stuffing which gave them some support.

None had storage which allowed easy lifting while minimizing physical contact. So, taking a page from the Minnestoa Historical Society (which has really excellent information on their website, by the way), I set out to make custom supports for the moccasins, both internal and external.

I started with the moccasins, like this one. It had no internal support, although the large amount of beading held the shape of the foot fairly effectively.


Then I looked at what I had on hand: Cotton stockinette fabric, polyester quilt batting, scissors, and a sewing kit. The scissors, by the way, are distressingly dull. Must remember to sharpen those sometime.


For my first try, I made a rectangular pillow:


Okay, so it was approximately rectangular. I'm a collections manager, not a seamstress. But look how nicely it supports the back of the moccasin:


But, it occurred to me, feet are not rectangular. So the rest of the moccasin support inserts were made to be roughly foot shaped. Again, I emphasize roughly.


And check out the sole of the shoe above. Looks like it was recycled from a parfleche, or some other similarly decorated object.

And finally, after sewing 33 supports, all the moccasins were supported. I endeavored to recreate the external support which the MHS had utilized, and, ultimately, I think it worked out pretty well. Ours are made of acid free card board with a tissue paper layer on which the moccasins sit (because the cardboard is buffered and the tissue paper is not).






The freshly housed moccasins were returned to their wooden drawers where they will patiently await the move to a new facility.


Ultimately, this kind of storage will reduce the need for handling the moccasins which will help preserve them for a longer time. Feels like a happy ending to me!

Answer 8-156

Last Friday's Whatzit was correctly identified by Allyson! It is a parfleche.



Parfleches were used to carry many things including foodstuffs and clothing. They are often decorated in bright colors and the designs are sometimes maps (according to one online source I read). I think of parfleches as the pre-runner to backpacks and suitcases. I'm not sure how apt that analogy is, but these objects certainly seem to be useful.

The parfleche is made of leather or hide which has long since stiffened and dried out, making it impossible to unfold it and use it as it was originally intended without causing significant and irreversible damage to it.

Whatzit

Okay folks, you know the drill. Small portion of larger object shown. What's the larger object?



No clues, but I hope you guess. I think this is a fun one.

The Return of Answers

Last Friday's mystery image garnered three guesses, all of which were in the right area. Bowl, Southwest pottery, pottery jug.

This is a small Acoma bowl. We have several small Acoma pottery pieces. Acoma pottery is associated with the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, thought to be the longest continuously habitated place in the United States. The original collector tended to collect objects as art pieces, so we lack information regarding the age and history of this vessel.

The Return of Friday Whatzit

Great googly moogly! It's Friday already. Where has the week gone?

I've spent this week wrangling schedules, fighting with my email, and cataloging whistles and miniature totem poles. We're definitely getting back into the swing of things around here.

But here's the Friday Whatzit for the week. I'm continuing with the "small portion of a photo" version of our game. I'm not feeling particularly generous, so no clues this week.



So what do you think?

Flickr

Well, like the good folks at the IMA, I've gone revolutionary. That is to say, I've signed up this museum-in-development for Flickr and joined the dozens of museums using the photo-hosting site to host photos and potentially invite community involvement.

www.flickr.com More of CWU Museum's photos

At the moment, it's just an account under the name "cwumuseum", but in the future we could easily create a group or groups for special events, the museum in general, or anything we cared to. In the meantime, the images are mostly past Whatzits.

Dance Shield, 3-342

Last week I asked you what this might be a part of:


Guesses included a shield, a spirit board, and two guesses of a mask. Shield is the closest guess. (click on image for a larger version)


According to the accession information, corroborated with some google searching, this object is a dance shield or dance paddle from the Trobriand Islands. The ethnologist I referred to was Bronislaw Malinowski, whose name I enjoy pronouncing.

The shields (we actually have two such objects in the collection) are beautiful but fragile. The pigments, especially the white, are not secure. Just taking the photos I took for these posts resulted in white pigment left on the dark background, just under the weight of the object itself. Until such time as we can consider professional conservation treatment, all who might handle these objects must be extremely careful and consider the implications setting it down on a table may have for the pigment.

Are you ready for your close up?

I liked last week's version of Whatzit, so I'm going to keep that up until I hear objections. Here's a small part of a larger object for you to mull over this weekend:



What kind of clues can I give you? The base material is wood. And certain famous ethnologists (famous, I suppose, if you majored in anthropology (which I did)) did work in the area this object is from.

Happy weekend!

Bentwood Box, 3-311

Ding ding ding! Larissa is on a roll with two in a row correct. This past week's Whatzit gave you this tiny image:



And asked you to guess what the larger object was. Larissa guessed that it was a bentwood box.



This box is from the Northwest Coast and the motif appears to be a beaver. There are small shells that decorate the corners of the lid. Although the paint appears to have been "touched up" at some point in the past (obscuring original materials and possibly original colors), the box is still a treasure.

Friday Whatzit

So I think we're going to try this whole Whatzit Friday thing as variations on a theme. By which I mean, sometimes I will post an image of an object for you to guess, which is what I have been doing, but sometimes I am going to do something different. And by something different, I mean I'm going to post a close-up, a detail shot, a portion of the object and you can try to extrapolate. My inspiration is the child's brain teaser where there's a super-close up of something kind of woody and yellow, and it slowly pans out to reveal a bunch of pencils.

Let's try it with this first image:



The style of this object should be fairly easy to get from the picture, but what the whole object is? That's a sight more difficult.

Okay, have at it! Look for a reveal on Tuesday (since I'm posting after business hours EST).

Sending out an SOS to the world

Okay, it's not really an SOS, but I've got that song by The Police in my head.

I do need your help. I've got a real whatzit situation on my hands. As in, what is this object? My documentation says "adze handle" (an identification made after it came into museum possession), but I remain skeptical. It appears to be made of bone with what appears to be baleen threaded through two of three holes at one end. One bundle of baleen is curved and twisted, the other is straight.





My guess is that it has to do with basket making or baleen processing, given the presence of baleen, but that's just a guess. Several google searches were no help in finding images of baleen processing tools, so I can't back up my guess. I suppose it could be an adze handle, but it's unusual for one, I think.

What do you think it might be? Why? Help me, blogosphere, you're my only hope.