University Daily Kansan, November 20, 1980
Page 5
Anthropology museum finds home in Spooner
By JANE NEUFELD
Staff Reporter
The Anthropology Museum finally has found a home of its own in Spooner Hall.
In 1947, the museum was formally recognized as a branch of the Natural History Museum. In the mid-1970s, it was moved to cramped quarters in Blake Annex. Last year, it came to rest in Spooner Hall, where last month it was opened to the public.
The anthropology exhibits will stay in Spooner, said Alfred Johnson, director of the museum.
"This is the last move," Johnson said. "We have a harpoon gun upstairs. We'll set it up in front of the door if anyone tries to move us again."
Spooner Hall was built in 1894, and it is the oldest building on campus. It housed the University's art museum from 1926 until 1978, the Forsman Poresner Spencer Museum of Art opened.
Johnson said the Anthropology Museum was moved to Spooner because Spooner provided an environmentally controlled, spacious home for the collection.
The museum includes valuable research collections of prehistoric artifacts from the Great Plains area and the Midwestern United States, including bone and wood materials taken from recent primitive societies.
The ethnographic collections contain clothing, cradle boards, beaded decorations, bowls, arrows and baskets from the Plains Indians; clothing, sandals and shirts from the Appalachian and Eskimos; and bronze statues from Nigeria.
The museum also has collections from Oceania, Australia, New Guinea and the Pacific.
Many of the materials were donated by alumni who collected them as hobbies around the 1900s, Johnson and others.
He said that 'Claude Brown, a turn-of-the-century big-game hunter, brought back a collection of African Chokwe materials that was one of only several in the world.
"One of the problems we have is that the collections have been very poorly stored for years and years," Johnson said.
At one time, such materials were not considered important, he said. In the 1920s, some Northwest Coast Indian artifacts were stored in the steam tunnels under Strong Hall.
Even when the museum was in Blake Annex, Johnson said, some items were improperly stored.
He said that because Blake Anne was a small building, there was no room for displays, and many items were packed floor to ceiling in a storeroom in the basement of Blake Hall.
taking inventory of the collections now, Johnson said, and the next step will be to clean and restore them.
"It's going to take a lot of time and a lot of money, I'm afraid, before we get them into a deal."
THE MUSEUM has a $20,000 Natural Science Foundation grant to restore the collections and a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to plan permanent exhibitions
Johnson said the museum eventually would have exhibitions in the first-floor main gallery, ethnographic items for research and teaching purposes on the second floor and prehistoric archeological materials for research and teaching in the basement.
Ed Abels gets some seasonal exercise by raking leaves in front of his home at 2208 Massachusetts St. According to Abels, people shouldn't slow down just because of age. "You gotta keep going," he says.
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