The History Blog

This time it’s the X-Files donating a bunch of geegaws to the The National Museum of American History in anticipation of the upcoming movie sequel to the original tundra crapfest.

During a special ceremony today, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History received a collection of objects from “The X-Files,” the television series and movie franchise. Twentieth Century Fox together with Chris Carter, series and film writer, director and producer, and Frank Spotnitz, series and film director and producer, presented an annotated script from the series’ pilot episode, FBI badges, posters and other objects to the museum’s entertainment collections.

I’m afraid the collection of objects doesn’t look terribly impressive:

A scale model of the original Enterprise it ain’t.

Do you know how I come up with entry-worthy stories for this here wee bloggeh? Every day I check 4 or 5 news sites that I’ve found to have a good range of archaeology/history themed news, but my the bulk of my finds come from a vast panoply of Google News Alerts that I have set up.

Every day, several times a day, Google News sends me a list of articles that have appeared using a certain keyword. I have about 10 or so keywords so I get piles of alerts often packed with irrelevancy but there are always some nuggets worth the panning.

Well, thanks to one Henry “Indiana” Jones, Jr., some of my richest ore, the “archaeology” “archaeologist” family of keywords, has turned pyrite. Every single story is about that damn movie! It’s Indiana Jones is a horrible archaeologist here and Indiana Jones makes archaeology look sexy there, like, 10 times a day.

It’s not just the journalists, either. Archaeological society and university department/club press releases read like the pink, heart-shaped diaries of a bobby soxer.

I can’t takes it no more!11 I might have to boycott the movie to protest the hell the Lucas/Spielberg publicity machine has put me through. Or at least delay watching it until the furore dies down.

Oh okay, I’ll probably see it this weekend, let’s be honest, but I’ll be totally frikkin grumpy about it!

Do you ever wonder how dig workers get fed? I figured it was either hotel food or camping food, but the truth turns out to be a lot more interesting (and delicious) than that.

Evans came to the role of dig cook, which she adores, more by chance than planning. About 10 years ago her husband, who has a long-standing interest in archaeology, spotted an advertisement from a British academic looking for someone to cook for 15 people at an excavation site in Cyprus.

“I thought, 15 people, I could do that,” Evans says. “If someone asks me to cook for their party, I get really excited.

“I’ve done catering, worked in restaurants and cafes and done a lot of my friends’ weddings but I had never thought of cooking as a way of travelling and seeing other parts of the world.”

She got the job. “Then I had to get an atlas and look up exactly where Cyprus was.”

Much coolness ensues. Apparently archaeologists eat two breakfasts because they start so early in the morning and then try to avoid the midday heat.

She never knows what sort of cooking apparatus she’s going to find on site, whether it’s mud brick ovens or old Pepsi fridges like the 50’s one with the built-in bottle opener in Back to the Future.

But damn, she scores some fantastic produce from the locals. Who needs electricity when you’ve got this:

“One man used to turn up with 48 huge, perfect peaches on a tray, straight from the tree. Local women used to give me olives. They used to make haloumi in one village and we used to buy big buckets of it.”

AIA = Archaeological Institute of America. Why was Mr. Ford, aka Indiana Jones, an “archaeologist” indistinguishable from the looters the AIA decries, elected to this position?

“Harrison Ford has played a significant role in stimulating the public’s interest in archaeological exploration,” said Brian Rose, President of the AIA. “We are all delighted that he has agreed to join the AIA’s Governing Board.” […]

Harrison Ford is already helping to raise public awareness of the AIA and its mission as the news of his election to the Board has spread. Many media outlets have covered the story.

And there you have it. They might as well benefit from the publicity of the revived Indiana Jones series even though Dr. Jones is about as far from a role model for archaeologists as you could conceive.

Oh well… I’m sure Harrison Ford will do just fine in his role as board member, whatever that might entail. Clearly he’s already done the job the AIA hoped he’d do by bringing attention to the organization.

Officially it’s called International Monuments and Sites Day, but that’s a tad unwieldy so April 18th is World Heritage Day in the common argot.

This year, the theme is “Religious Heritage and Sacred Places”, but the International Council on Monuments and Sites won’t send hired goons to your door or anything if you chose to celebrate other historical sites instead.

So go check out that pornographically opulent Beaux Arts building downtown you’ve been meaning to visit, or maybe go see what’s shaking at a local museum.

Love from me and Heritage Malta.

Today it’s been 2 months since I revived my blog and I’ve posted at least an entry day. Thanks for reading and commenting. It makes me happeh.

In the comments on yesterday’s entry about the museum raids, I noted that it was virtually impossible for a substantial collection in the United States to be built quickly out of provenanced antiquities because the demand far outstrips legitimate supply. Clutch asked:

So, are all the graduates of curating/gallery studies/museum studies doomed to careers of self-deception or outright fraud? Do you think anything can be done? If the legal/moral supply really is too small, and the demand is large, it strikes me that a “War on Drugs” approach of occasional prosecutions will work no better than… well, the War on Drugs. Do you see a practical course of action that could help?

Assuming the curator wants to work in the North America, there are two approaches I can think of which could help de-loot the system: 1) buy local, and 2) pursue long-term loans and travelling exhibits.

The lust for classical or exotic fureign antiquities seems to me a vestige of the Gilded Age parvenue attitude that prestige and class can be bought. Nowadays, there are all kinds of museums with a more narrow focus on local history.

There’s still a huge traffic in looted local antiquities, mind you, especially Native American and Civil War, but it would be easier to trace the provenance on such pieces and most importantly, to team up with legitimate archaeological excavations and arrange the display of their finds.

The money, though, is in long-term loans and travelling exhibits. This would work both with local antiquities under the control of government agencies (national parks, for instance) and tribal governments, and with other countries’ antiquities.

There are already established loan mechanisms between museums, and many countries with a surfeit of antiquities would doubtless be glad to negotiate long-term loans of stuff they have in storage or can ill-afford to preserve.

First there needs to be a serious culture shift, however. As things stand, curators and the collector class who populate museum boards have been more than content to rationalize their wallowing in the loot trade sty. The froo-froo talk about antiquities “belonging to the world” or worse, the patronizing “we can take care of it better than they can” excuses for trafficking in goods stolen at massive cost in site destruction and even human life, have to stop.

Here’s some unusual WWI photography. It’s thousands of soldiers forming a well-known image photographed from a tower.

During World War I, photographers Arthur S. Mole and John D. Thomas traveled from one military camp to another taking photos of soldiers forming patriotic symbols as a part of planned promotional campaign to sell war bonds.[…]

Mole and Thomas spent days preparing formations which were photographed from a 70 to 80 foot tower with an 11 by 14 inch camera.

Pretty nifty as war bonds campaigns go.

A terracotta image of Mallinath, the nineteenth Jain Tirthankar of the present age, has been discovered by archaeologists in Jessore, Bangladesh, and she’s all woman.

In the ancient religion of Jainism, Tirthankars are ascetics who have achieved enlightenment (aka nirvana) and are therefore no longer bound by karma to the circle of reincarnation.

There are two main sects of Jainism: Shvetambar and Digambara. Shvetambars hold that Mallinath was a woman and the only female Tirthankar of the present age. According to the Digambara, women (in the present age, at least) cannot achieve enlightenment.

The Khulna Archaeology Department kept this discovery on the down low “for security reasons”. I’m curious as to what the concern might have been exactly, but I bet it has something to do with the controversy over Mallinath’s gender.