Tombstones From My Home State? In Front of the Archives? Should I be Worried?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the National Anthropological Archives is located in the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland.  It is a haul for me to get there from where I live in the city, but I find it to be worth the wait, especially considering some of the factors highlighted in Phil's recent posts (going to bigger archives can be a pain).  

As far as I can tell, the Museum Support Center consists of two main buildings.  The one pictured above is the main facility housing much of the behind the scenes material for the museums on the Mall.  At the same site the National Museum of the American Indian has its new Cultural Resources Center (CRC).  I've never been in the CRC myself, but I've seen pictures and it look like a stunning new facility.  

Down the road, the museum has another support facility for the Air and Space Museum.  You can tell its not a regular office building because they have one of these sitting in the parking lot. Just chillin'.  

Upon walking onto the grounds of the Museum Support Center (after showing ID of course) you have a pleasant walk towards the main building, pictured above.  The Smithsonian has done a nice job adding outdoor sculptures to what would otherwise be a  normal looking government building.  Still pretty plain, right?  

Not so fast.  

I noticed one day when walking into the building that a number of tombstone-like objects adorned one side of the facility.  Upon closer inspection, the objects all bore the names of places and quarry companies, most of which were from my home state, Minnesota.  You can probably see why I walked past these things for a couple of weeks thinking that they were, in fact, tombstones.  When I looked more closely, however, it was clear that the inscriptions bore no names or dates, just the name of quarry companies and cities, including Minneapolis and St. Cloud.  

I finally asked around inside the Museum Support Center this week.  Most of the security guards I asked shrugged their shoulders.  They asked me to let them know when I finally figured out what the heck they were.  My archivist at the NAA told me that she wasn't quite sure what they were, but she promised to e-mail around.  She mentioned that they just kind of showed up one week awhile back -- as if the secret geology police had moved them there in the middle of the night.  A few hours later she was able to give me a tentative answer.  

Apparently, geological specimens, at one point, would be carved and adorned in order to show where they had originated from.  The collection comes from the Smithsonian's mineralogy collections and may have been on display at one point.  

Again, this is the tentative answer the staff was able to provide.  I've never seen any pictures of carved geological specimens on display, but it wouldn't surprise me.  Moreover, I study mainly art and anthropology so I could have easily missed displays of this kind.  It has long been commonplace for paleontology and geology exhibits to display polished petrified wood like this. Petrified wood, as it occurs in nature looks more . . . well . . . natural.  

The Smithsonian's online catalogue contains a number of beautiful images of geology exhibitions including this gem (pun intended) from 1903.

But the 1903 exhibit shot does not show any of the mysterious quarry stones.  Nor does this shot from 1919.  The 1919 picture, however, clearly contains a polished stone, center right.  The stone appears to be clean, however, and not adorned with its location like the stones outside of the Museum Support Center.  Later images of gem and mineral displays at the Smithsonian show mainly smaller specimens.  This image from 1930 provides an example.  

My hunch would be that the answer may not lie in the geology exhibitions, but rather in the collections and displays of the Arts and Industries Museum.  The main hall of the A&I Museum circa 1927 can be viewed here.  I think it would make sense to consider geological mining an "industry" to be displayed in exhibitions showing the various geological resources in North America.  

Apparently, my home state of Minnesota was reppin' it at some point in the nation's attic.  

I'll continue to poke around to see if I can find a more complete answer.  

Diving Back In

 I return to the archives this summer after devoting a semester to learning how to teach American history.  Admittedly, a part of me is apprehensive to dive back into my project, having grown comfortable in my routine.  And yet, I love research and writing.  The unmistakeable smell of archival documents will no doubt trigger some of the more sensitive synapses in my brain.  Unfortunately, my passion for my research is not yet reflective in my scholarly writing, which is still a work in progress.   

UC Berkeley's Department of History has asked us to complete a pre-dissertation prospectus. Our goal for this summer is sort of analogous to accepting a promise ring.  After this summer we will all be somewhat like a high school cheerleaders; we won't quite be engaged to our projects, but will certainly take a step in that direction.  

My planned dissertation, Making the Modern Museum in the United States: Art, Anthropology and the Desire to Understand Human Culture, intends to examine the history of anthropology and art museums in America past their foundations up to the post-Second World War Era. This summer, I will be conducting research at the National Anthropological Archives, a branch of the Smithsonian Institution.  The overarching theme of my research is to examine how the operation of institutions influence and shape ideas.  

This summer, I will specifically be looking at an archival collection documenting the transfer of human skeletal remains from the U.S. Army Medical Museum to the Smithsonian.  I have, for some time, been interested in the process of building museums collections and, moreover, deciding what types of collections belong where.  Does a Moche statue belong in an art museum or a natural history museum?  While these questions are pertinent to the process of founding museums, I am more interested in how museums continued these debates after they were already established. 

I am particularly sensitive to the idea of constructing collections of human remains in museums, having worked with these types of collections first-hand in several museums.  This summer, I don't anticipate any need to work with the remains themselves, instead attempting to understand the historical process of their collection and care over time.  

The collection could serve as a jumping off point for my dissertation.  The U.S. Army Medical Museum, in attempting to build an encyclopedic collection of the various kinds of battle injuries experienced by troops, starting collecting human skeletal remains around the time of the Civil War.  The institution eventually requested that Army field surgeons send skeletal remains from around the globe.  The museum was especially interested in obtaining examples of human remains from the Native Americans of the American West.   

After building a vast collection of human skeletal remains, the Army Medical Museum grew to be more interested in soft tissue samples.  The collection of skeletal remains was transferred to the Smithsonian between 1898 and 1904.  This summer, I will be studying how this process took place.  What was the rhetoric surrounding the transfer?  Who made these decisions and why?  How did the operation of these institutions shape the type of research that was conducted?  What type of legacy do these remains possess?

For more about my work, I'll point readers in the direction of my webstite, click here.