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Cross Roads of Culture
Anthropology Collections at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science
By Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Stephen E. Nash, Steven R. Holen University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2010 University Press of Colorado and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-024-1
CHAPTER 1
"One of the Great Institutions"
An Introduction
"As Denver is destined to be among the great cities of the Continent so will a museum here founded ... grow up to be one of the great entertaining and educational institutions in the country."
— Edwin Carter, on his vision for the museum, ca. 1894
On any given day you can visit the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and discover a bustling scene: visitors touring exhibits, school groups interacting with museum volunteers, hungry patrons eating at the T-Rex Cafe, crowds pushing into the Planetarium, eager listeners filling Ricketson Auditorium for a public lecture. The museum reaches, on average, about 1.3 million visitors every year — a number that is only exceeded by the Field Museum, Smithsonian Institution, and American Museum of Natural History. In short, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science is a big and busy place.
The hectic "front" of the museum — the exhibits, lecture halls, classrooms, theaters, and atria — hides a "back" of the museum that is also bustling. Out of public view, a staff that numbers in the hundreds oversees the museum's day-to-day operations, planning and creating exhibits, seeking and securing funding, and enticing and tending to visitors. Although the museum's curatorial staff often engages with the public through lectures, classes, and research activities, they too are often hidden behind-the-scenes, conducting research and working to care for the museum's most essential asset: its scientific collections.
Less than 1 percent of the museum's collections are on display at any given time. More than 1 million natural history objects — dinosaurs, meteorites, ancient pottery — sit on shelves, like a library for the fields that study the world's detritus, conscientiously cared for until they are needed for display, education, or research. These objects are what make the museum distinct from other cultural institutions; they are the museum's raison d'être, underpinning all of its programs and endeavors. And yet few visitors are fully aware of the museum's vast and irreplaceable holdings. The Department of Anthropology cares for more than 50,000 objects from every corner of the globe (Table 1).
For many years, behind-the-scenes tours have been limited to small occasional groups in part because the collections have long been spread throughout the museum, sometimes stored in improvised and awkward quarters, such as behind the curved walls of dioramas. The museum's rich anthropology collections are especially challenged because, for the last decade, the museum has only had permanent exhibits illustrating Egyptian archaeology and American Indian ethnology. (Ethnology is a branch of anthropology that analyzes the nature of living cultures.) Only through occasional public programs and small temporary exhibits are the museum's expansive archaeology and world ethnology collections highlighted. The fact that there has never been a catalog or book summarizing the museum's anthropology holdings has only further obscured the collection from public view.
This book serves as a tangible version of a behind-the-scenes tour. It is an introduction to the cultural treasures at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. The objects presented here — selected for their individual beauty, historic value, and cultural meanings — represent how the Rocky Mountains of the American West have been a cultural crossroads for millennia. From the mammoth hunters of the Plains to the Ancestral Pueblo villages of the Colorado Plateau to the first American pioneer settlers to the flourishing Hispanic and Asian diasporas in downtown Denver, the Rocky Mountains have been home to a breathtaking array of peoples. Many of the objects tell the story of the Rocky Mountains' fascinating and complex past, whereas others serve to bring enigmatic corners of the globe to modern-day Denver.
The book's theme of "crossroads" is also embodied in the objects themselves, for most of the objects connect disparate places and times and people. The glass trade beads woven into the Zulu apron relate a long history of exchange between European settlers and African hosts (Plate 104). The Thomas Jefferson "peace medal" presented to an Indian leader in the midst of colonial explorations similarly reflects a complex historical moment of cultural contact (Plate 36). Creating an American flag n a traditional Navajo weaving shows the shared citizenship of Navajos with all Americans (Plate 8). Even the ancient Clovis points (Plate 66), millennia old, represent a deep-rooted cultural nowledge of lithic technology that the first Americans brought with them from the frozen lands of northern Asia.
Further still, the crossroads image characterizes the museum itself. The institution sits in a city with a diverse contemporary population, with different needs and perspectives; it is a "contact zone" in which the past is thrust into the future. Even the building is a symbol of changing times and people as it is the result of ten different building episodes, with nearly as many architectural styles and technologies. Perched high atop the east end of Denver's City Park, a magnificent civic space and a product of the City Beautiful movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the museum strives to welcome everyone. The museum is uniquely positioned to serve as a forum for public life in which different parts of a single community converge to explore both the unique cultural branches of humankind's tree and the shared roots of our common humanity.
In this volume, then, you will learn about the collection's history and potential, the chronicles of culture written into things, and also the shifting role of anthropology in natural history museums. You will learn about different kinds of crossroads: the historical crossroads of the Rocky Mountains; the objects that relate the intersection of distinct human communities; and the museum as a crossroads for a contemporary community, as a public meeting place to collectively contemplate the human experience. By writing this book we have sought to figuratively move the anthropology collection beyond the museum's walls and into the public sphere. This book is the outcome of our belief that we, as curators, are only the stewards of the objects held in the public trust — that the collection should not belong to a select and privileged few but rather to all the people who call the Rocky Mountains home.
ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE MUSEUM
Gold, in large part, led to the birth of modern Denver — and to the genesis of the city's natural history museum. Edwin Carter was one of the few men who picked his way to fortune from Colorado's famous 1859 Pike's Peak Gold Rush. In 1868, Carter gave up gold mining and turned to his love of science and nature. Over the ensuing decades he amassed one of the most complete assemblages of Colorado fauna. As he grew older, a dream flowered inside Carter's mind of turning his collection into the foundation of a museum. "As Denver is destined to be among the great cities of the Continent," he once said, "so will a museum here founded ... grow up to be one of the great entertaining and educational institutions in the country." In 1899, just three months before Carter died, a group of prominent Colorado citizens purchased his collection with the intention of establishing a natural history museum in Denver.
The new Colorado Museum of Natural History, today known as the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, was incorporated on December 6, 1900. After eight years of construction and assembling a collection of 3,400 specimens, the museum opened its Greek Revival doors to the public, exhibiting rare minerals, exotic birds and mammals, and cultural objects. The museum was then on the edge of town, serviced only by a dirt road and surrounded by fields of oats and hay. After stumbling through its first years, the museum soon found its footing under the leadership of director Jesse D. Figgins, hired away from New York's American Museum of Natural History. Collections accumulated, the building quintupled in size, and by 1912 more than 100,000 people visited annually, then the equivalent of almost half of Denver's population.
Within a decade of the museum's opening, scientific research joined exhibition as an integral part of the institution's activities, although initial research focused on zoology and paleontology. Then, in 1927, in Folsom, New Mexico, museum paleontologists, sent by Figgins, made one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century: Paleoindian projectile points in direct association with the bones of Bison antiquus, an extinct species of bison. This discovery — confirmed and verified in the field by the American Museum of Natural History's Barnum Brown and the Smithsonian Institution's Frank H.H. Roberts, among others — revolutionized North American archaeology by pushing the known human occupation of North America back by thousands of years, to the end of the last Ice Age, which was then believed to have ended about 10,000 years ago.
After more than a decade of archaeological excavations directed by non-archaeologists, the Department of Archaeology was formally created in 1935 when the museum hired H. Marie Wormington, a twenty-one-year-old with a bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of Denver. Building on the Folsom discovery, for the next thirty years, Paleoindian research was the department's primary focus, although Wormington also conducted fieldwork in western Colorado on Archaic and Fremont cultural sites and accepted donations of ethnological materials. In 1937, Wormington was named the first curator of archaeology. She oversaw the opening of the museum's first permanent anthropology exhibit, the Hall of the Prehistoric Peoples of the Americas, which opened in 1956.
A trailblazer, Wormington was the first woman at Harvard to receive a Ph.D. with a specialty in archaeology, and in 1968, she became the first woman to be elected president of the Society for American Archaeology. She later recalled in an interview that one director at the museum "didn't feel there was a place for either a woman or an archaeologist in a science museum. ... I always published under my initials, H. M. Wormington. The director of a museum felt nobody would read a book written by a woman." She was not only a pioneer in a male-dominated field but also a constant advocate for museum-based archaeology. Wormington left the museum in 1968, having made significant contributions to North American archaeology, particularly through the publication of Ancient Man in North America and Prehistoric Indians of the Southwest, popular both with professional and avocational audiences. She received numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1970, an honorary doctorate from Colorado State University in 1977, and the Society for American Archaeology's Distinguished Service Award in 1983. With Wormington's contributions, the museum continued to flourish throughout the mid-twentieth century.
Meanwhile, across the country, as Denver's natural history museum was blossoming, Mary W.A. Crane and her husband, Francis V. Crane, purchased their first Native American artifact in 1951. The well-heeled Cranes would spend nearly the next two decades doing little else but collecting Indian objects from throughout North America, from Alaska's Point Hope to the Florida Keys. As curator emerita of ethnology Joyce Herold has written, from more than 300 primary and secondary sources, the Crane Collection "has at least one — and often many — of the most essential objects tracing Native North American ways of life." The Cranes missed the heyday of collecting that established anthropology at institutions such as the Field Museum, American Museum of Natural History, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and Museum of the American Indian (now the National Museum of the American Indian). But as these museums began focusing more on display and less on collecting, the Cranes began purchasing selected and important items that still remained on the market. Although the Crane Collection includes pieces that date to the 1700s, most of their efforts focused on materials from the mid-twentieth century. Thus, their collection represents an important period of collecting not often well-represented in other major museums.
Desiring to share their rare collection, the Cranes established the Southeast Museum of the American Indian in Marathon, Florida. But the museum struggled. So they sought a new home for their singular collection. Mary Crane was then serving on the board of the Denver museum, and so through this connection in 1968 the museum committed to serving as the collection's new steward. The Cranes donated their entire collection of nearly 12,000 objects, as well as photographic and paper documentation. With this addition, the museum created the Department of Anthropology. To this day, it is believed, the Crane Collection is the second largest private American collection ever founding a museum department in the United States.
The museum staff methodically processed the Crane Collection. In 1978, the Crane American Indian Cultures Hall was completed under the direction of Arminta Neal and Joyce Herold, and notably with guidance and assistance from a committee of twenty-five indigenous advisors, the Native American Resources Group, one of the first of its kind in the United States. Notably, the dioramas for the exhibit were widely considered superb and state-of-the-art for the time and received rave reviews by the public and scholars alike for their beauty, sensitivity, and accuracy. They remain today a favorite feature of the exhibit hall for many visitors.
During the subsequent two decades, the Department of Anthropology increasingly focused on public education and temporary exhibition. In 1987, the national blockbuster exhibit Ramses II: The Great Pharaoh and His Time came to the museum, attracting nearly 1 million visitors. Traveling exhibitions with anthropological themes grew to be a regular part of the museum, and subsequent exhibits proved highly popular, including museum-produced and traveling exhibits such as Nomad: Masters of Eurasian Steppe (1990); Aztec: The World of Moctezuma (1992), which won top awards from the American Association of Museums (AAM); Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas (2004); Lewis and Clark: The National Bicentennial Exhibition (2005); Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition (2007); and Genghis Khan (2009). Additionally, smaller temporary exhibits were also created by museum staff, such as The Hmong Search for Freedom (1996), which received a major AAM award. Over the years, the museum also hosted world-renowned scientists, such as Mary and Richard Leaky, Stephen Jay Gould, and Jane Goodall. The museum board's current long-term plan includes a complete renovation of the permanent anthropology exhibit, to be completed by 2020. Between 1956 and 2009, the museum successfully presented more than 170 anthropology exhibits.
THE ETHICS OF COLLECTING, DISPLAYING, AND PRESERVING
In the late 1800s, as natural history museums were established, Native American communities were facing tremendous social, political, and economic pressures. Tribal lands were rapidly disappearing through federal laws designed to eliminate Indian lands, Native American children were forcibly sent to boarding schools, and tribal sovereignty was undermined as treaty after treaty was broken. An estimated 5 million indigenous peoples lived in what would become the United States when Columbus first set foot on what he believed was the outer edge of India; after more than four centuries of colonial turmoil a mere 250,000 Native Americans could be found in the United States.
At the close of the nineteenth century, the burgeoning field of anthropology established its calling to preserve the physical remnants of what was widely believed to be rapidly disappearing American Indian cultures. Anthropology, as a scientific field dedicated to the preservation of cultures, found an easy home in natural history museums, which sought to categorize and conserve every wondrous aspect of our world. With Native America threatened from every quarter, early museum anthropologists indeed were able to save many objects that otherwise would have been lost to time. And with its broad survey of human societies and its celebration of cultural diversity, anthropology helped awaken the Western world to the multiplicity of the human experience.
But this progress came at a steep price. Often, the goal of cultural preservation in fact contradictorily led to the destruction of Native traditions and the rupture of communities. In the name of science, vast numbers of objects — including human remains and sacred objects — were taken without regard for their spiritual and cultural contexts. Native Americans were sometimes portrayed as "naturals," akin to the extinct dinosaurs and dodos displayed nearby. Over time, these injurious aspects of natural history museums fanned the flames of resentment across Native America.
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Excerpted from Cross Roads of Culture by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Stephen E. Nash, Steven R. Holen. Copyright © 2010 University Press of Colorado and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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