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SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 1996
Secret treasures of SPOONER
EARL RICHARDSON/JOURNAL-WORLD PHOTOS
Albert Johnson, director of Kansas University's Museum of Anthropology, inspects one of the museum's many Native American kachina dolls. The dolls will be part of a spring 1997 exhibit at Spooner Hall.
An early 20th century moccasin is part of the museum's extensive collection of Native American artifacts.
A colorful wooden puppet from the Hazelle Rollins collection, will be on exhibit from Nov. 30 to Jan. 5, 1997.
- Kansas University's Museum of Anthropology offers visitors unique insights into human development.
BY DAVE TOPLIKAR
JOURNAL-WORLD WRITER
"But there aren't many anthropology museums," said Albert Johnson, director of Kansas University's Museum of Anthropology. "Because of the unique nature of what we're trying to do here, we hope to see the museum grow as a real regional attraction."
You can take your family to area zoos and area art and history museums.
The museum's home is in Spooner Hall, the oldest building on KU's campus. Designed by Henry Van
Brunt in the Romanesque Revival style, the building was erected in 1894 and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Inside is a public gallery, working laboratories for archeological digs and storage space for thousands of items that teach us who we are today by how we lived in ancient and not-so-ancient times.
"Our primary focus is on multiculturalism," Johnson said. "It's also to learn about and present information on other cultures on a worldwide basis."
KU's anthropology collections are strong in North American and South American Indian cultures and the cultures of Africa, Australia and, to a lesser extent, Oceania, a region of the central and south Pacific.
"We do archeological research to learn about the nature of these cultures before there were written records," Johnson said.
The museum has extensive collections on American Indian societies that predate written records.
Brad Logan, associate cura
Brad Logan, associate curator at the museum, now is conducting a $250,000 excavation project at the Army installation at Fort Leavenworth. He and a team of researchers are painstakingly sifting through an area where a disciplinary barracks will be built.
"The site is important because it looks like there are two, possibly three periods of occupation." Johnson said.
Johnson said that before the end of the summer, the researchers hope to be able to dig down to greater depths to see what else they can find.
"They're finding tools, spear points, arrow points, broken pieces of pottery, skin scraping tools and knives," he said. "If you have the pieces and the contextual information, the relationships between those artifacts, then it's possible to reconstruct a great deal of what happened in the past."
"The most recent, which is close to the surface, would date to about 600 years ago. Then at greater depth, around a foot to 2 feet, they have a second occupation date to about 4,000 years ago. And there are some indications that there are even earlier occupations before that."
but took into the far-flung past isn't all the museum does. Its exhibits are balanced between the prehistoric past, the world's colonial past and more modern times.
Researchers can tell what technology the ancient people used and get insights on their social organization and their religious beliefs, he said.
"We do a Day of the Dead Fiesta at Halloween time," he said.
The Day of the Dead is an important holiday that is observed widely in Mexico. The museum's exhibits, featuring exhibits of dolls with skeleton faces, will run from Oct. 26 to Nov. 17.
"The idea is that the souls of people's ancestors come back and visit and commune with them at the time of the festival," Johnson said.
the country. The works
The museum will also take part in the eighth annual Lawrence Indian Arts Show, Sept. 7 through Oct.20, which features work from contemporary American Indian artists from across
he country. The works include stone and bronze sculpture, pottery, paintings, drawings, jewelry, dolls, textiles and baskets.
Another fall semester
"The anthropology museum is unique in this part of the world," he said. "I would hope we could do more advertising to bring in more people from this region."
Another fall semester exhibit will be the Hazelle Rollins Puppets, which will be from Nov. 30 to Jan. 5. The show features hand, rod and stick, shadow and stringed puppets. Hazelle Rollins, a KU alumna who ran a puppet business in the Kansas City area, donated part of her collection from around the world to KU.
"We plan to continue into the future a Christmastime exhibit of those puppets for children," Johnson said.
Johnson said he would also like to expand the museum's exhibits to integrate video presentations, lectures, and musical and dance performances with the exhibits.
"It will make the exhibits more interesting and more broadly visible to the visitors," he said.
Funding for the museum mostly comes from donations. The Lawrence community has been supportive of the museum that way, he said.
Johnson said he hopes the museum can continue to see its collections grow. Major new collections will
Anthropologists worry that many artifacts are disappearing before they can be saved, he said.
be coming in soon, featuring artifacts from the Amazon area in South America and from South Africa, he said.
"Our museum and other anthropological museums have an obligation to collect as much of that material as possible and keep it for the future," he said. "It's not going to be around forever."
Spear points discovered in northwest Missouri fields fill a drawer in the museum's collection.
Hard at work in Spooner's basement, Kiersten Fourshe, a graduate student in physical anthropology from Detroit, sifts through material from the construction site for a new disciplinary barracks at Ft. Leavenworth.