CONTEXTS

The Annual Report of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology Volume 40 Spring 2015

About the Museum

The mission of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology is to inspire
creative and critical thinking about global cultures, past and present,
and to foster interdisciplinary understandings of the material world.
Established in 1956, it sponsors original research, innovative teaching,
and public education while stewarding a collection of over one million
archaeological and ethnographic objects. The Museum serves Brown
Universitys students and faculty, the city of Providence, the state of
Rhode Island, and the general public.
The museums gallery is in Manning Hall, 21 Prospect Street, Providence,
Rhode Island, on Browns main green. The museums Collections
Research Center is at 300 Tower Street, Bristol, Rhode Island.
Manning Hall Gallery Hours:
Tuesday Sunday, 10 a.m. 4 p.m.
Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology
Box 1965
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912
www.brown.edu/Haffenreffer
www.facebook.com/HaffenrefferMuseum
(401) 863-5700
haffenreffermuseum@brown.edu
Contexts
Editor: Kevin Smith
Produced by: Graphic Services
On the covers: Jane Souths Prologue, when displayed in the 2015 RISD Faculty Biennial
exhibition, projected a live image of her still life from the Haffenreffer Museums Collections
Research Center in Bristol. The still life in Bristol is shown on Contexts front cover; on the
back cover is the projected image, as seen in the Biennial exhibition.

From the Director

This past year has been busy

at the Haffenreffer Museum of
Anthropology and there is a lot
of exciting news to share.
Our exhibition program is going strong. In Deo Speramus: The Symbols and Ceremonies of Brown University
continues as part of the year-long celebration of
Browns 250th anniversary. It is a wonderful introduction to Brown University for the public and especially
for prospective students and their families. Our Lakota Star quilt is back after touring with the Muse du
quai Branlys traveling exhibition, The Plains Indians:
Artists of Earth and Sky. The exhibition opened in Paris
last spring, travelled to the Nelson-Atkins Museum
over the winter, and was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this spring.
Our Mellon funded Assemblages project with the RISD
Museum is well underway. We have appointed four
Teaching Fellows, two from Brown University and two
from RISD. They are actively integrating our two museums through their teaching, research, and artistic
practices. For example, Jane South created a wonderful exhibition for the RISD Faculty Biennial. Titled
PrologueStaging Still Life: The Mute Object Speaks,
it enlists objects from both museums collections
to serve as actors in a theatrical assemblage. She
challenges us to consider how objects move between
categories and contexts.
Brown faculty are increasingly using objects from
our collections as a way of enhancing their pedagogy.
Courtney Martin shares how museum objects from
Africa, the Americas, and Asia supported her goals of
broadening her course on the global history of art and
architecture beyond the Western canon. Pat Rubertone
discusses how examining actual prehistoric soapstone
bowls from New England gave her students valuable
insights into the details of their manufacture and their
relationships to quarry sites. Ian Straughn draws attention to the power of gold to enchant us and how this
power can sometimes hinder our ability to understand
its symbolic and ritual use by other cultures.
Brown students are conducting innovative research.
Mge Duruzu-Tanrver, a Joukowsky Institute graduate student, and her colleagues are studying our
Luristan bronzes and comparing them to those in the
collections of the RISD Museum. Luristan bronzes
were widely faked, so they are conducting X-Ray Fluorescence spectroscopy (pXRF) analyses to assess their
elemental signatures. Kellie Roddy, an undergraduate
archaeology concentrator, is studying our West Mexican figurines for her senior thesis. These ceramics
often occur in male and female pairs and were placed
in shaft tombs. She is conducting both stylistic and
pXRF analyses and has identified intriguing clusters.

Our collections continue to grow thanks to generous

donations from faculty, alumni, and friends. We are
especially fortunate to have received a gift of Mesoamerican objects from the John C. Scheffler Estate.
Scheffler was part of the archaeological team led
by E. Wyllys Andrews IV that excavated the famous
Maya site of Dzibilchaltn in the early 1960s. He was
a skilled draughtsman and produced the first detailed
map of the site. The Scheffler family picked Brown as
the appropriate home for the collection because of
the Museums reputation as a teaching museum.
Finally, we have a new logo designed by Emma Funk,
a Brown undergraduate who owns her own design
firm. Our newly redesigned website is a wonderful
way to learn more about our activities and programs.
We have begun converting our database management system from Argus to Museum Plus. This process will allow us to make our collections publically
available online.
I encourage you to attend our public lecture series and
to visit us at Manning Hall to see our latest exhibitions.

Robert W. Preucel

Announcements

Assemblages Program
Mellon Teaching Fellows
Appointed

Dates set for Assemblages

Conference

The Assemblages Advisory Board has appointed

two sets of Mellon Teaching Fellows. The first
group consists of Vazira Zamindar (Department of
History, Brown University) and Jane South (Department of Sculpture, RISD). Their term is the 2015
calendar year. The second group is Graham Oliver
(Department of Classics, Brown University) and
Amy Leidtke (Department of Design, RISD).
Their term is the 2015-2016 academic year.

The first Assemblages conference will be held on

Sept 25 and 26, 2015. Invited speakers include
David Joselit, Distinguished Professor of Art
History, CUNY Graduate Center, and Rosemary
Joyce, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished
Professor of Social Sciences at UC Berkeley.

Program Coordinator Hired

Alexandra Poterack has been hired to serve as the
coordinator of the Assemblages program. She will
be based at the RISD Museum.

Photography Assistant Hired

Crystal Ngo Awarded

Assemblages Fellowship
Crystal Ngo has been selected for a Graduate
School Interdisciplinary Opportunity Research
Fellowship to work with the museum for the 20152016 academic year. Crystal is a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies and
will be conducting research complementary to the
Assemblages project.

Sophia Sobers, Adjunct Faculty in the Department

of Digital + Media at RISD, has been hired as a
Mellon Photography Assistant as part of the Assemblages project. Sophia is an accomplished photographer and artist and her duties will be to assist
with the digitization of our collections.

Faculty News
Douglas Anderson Retires from
Anthropology Department
Douglas Anderson has retired from the Department of Anthropology as of June 30, 2014. He remains active as ever and will continue as Director
of the Museums Circumpolar Laboratory.

Faculty Fellows Selected

Five faculty fellows have been selected for the
2014-2015 term. These are Paja Faudree (Department of Anthropology), Cathy Lutz (Department
of Anthropology), Courtney Martin (Department
of History of Art and Architecture), Itohan Osayimwese (Department of History of Art and Architecture), and Patricia Rubertone (Department of
Anthropology). Paja was also a fellow during the
2013-2014 term.

Faculty Affiliates Appointed

The Haffenreffer Museum has established a Faculty Affiliate position to recognize those faculty
members with especially close ties to the Museum.
We have selected Elizabeth Hoover (Department
of American Studies), a past proctor and Faculty
Fellow, Steve Lubar (Department of History), a
past Director, and Bill Simmons (Department of
Anthropology), a past Interim Director, to be our
first Faculty Affiliates.

Staff News

Director receives Smithsonian

Institution Fellowship

Robert Preucel has been selected as one of two

inaugural Faculty Fellows for the Smithsonian
Institutions Summer Institute in Museum
Anthropology. The program seeks to promote
broader and more effective use of museum
collections in anthropological research by
providing a supplement to university training.
Bob plans to use his SIMA Fellowship in two
ways. He will work on extending the theory
of object-based teaching. This will involve
examining how it currently articulates with
contemporary approaches to materiality, object
agency, and thing theory. He also will enhance
his Native American art and archaeology class
that serves as introduction to the art and
material culture of the indigenous peoples of
North America.

Deputy Director Participates

in NSF Panel and SAA
Committee roles

Kevin Smith served as one of five members

representing the United States and NSF on a
twelve-nation review panel for the Belmont
Forums Collaborative Research Action fund for
Arctic Observing and Research for Sustainability.
He chairs the Committee on Museums,
Collections, and Curation of the Society for
American Archaeology and represents SAA on
the Consortium for Collections, which advises
the boards of SAA, the Society for Historical
Archaeology, and the American Cultural
Resources Association on issues relating to
collections management and museums.

Deputy Director and Colleagues

receive Research Seed Grant

Kevin Smith, along with Yongsong Huang, Peter

van Dommelen, and Andrew Scherer received
a Brown University Research Seed Award for
their proposal Climatic and Environmental
Reconstruction using Lipid Biomarkers in
Ancient Bones: Applications in Archaeology,
Paleoclimatology, and Paleontology.
This project will test an innovative new method
developed by Huang to extract paleo-climatic
data directly from the animal bones recovered
at archaeological sites. Samples from Smiths
excavations at Gilsbakki and Surtshellir,
Iceland, and from J. Louis Giddings and Douglas
Andersons excavations in Alaska, curated in the
Museums Laboratory for Circumpolar Research,
will provide northern sequences spanning
at least the past millennium; while samples

from Van Dommelens on-going excavations in

Sardinia and Scherers in Guatemala will provide
complementary data from Mediterranean and
tropical contexts.

Curator takes new position

Nathan Arndt, Assistant Curator, has accepted a

position as Curator at the University Museum of
the University of Northern Iowa. He will oversee
the closing of the old building and the move of its
operations to the center of campus. Nathan will
continue advising the Haffenreffer Museum in his
capacity as a curatorial affiliate.

New Registrar Hire Approved

The Office of the Provost has approved

the hire of a new registrar. The Registrar
oversees the Museums collection records
as part of the curatorial team, helps to
establish policies and priorities for managing
the collections and their records, oversees
its collections database, helps to organize
storage areas to ensure that objects are
adequately and accurately tracked, is
responsible for documenting loans and gifts,
and assists, as necessary, on team-developed
projects including exhibitions, internships,
and student research. A key task will be
overseeing the conversion of the collections
database management system from Argus to
Museum Plus.

Research Associates Appointed

Two Research Associates have been
appointed. These are Edward Ned Dwyer
(RISD) and Wanni Anderson (Department of
Anthropology). Ned is a specialist in Andean
archaeology and Andean textile arts. Wanni
is a specialist in Arctic and Southeast Asian
cultures and focuses on issues of diaspora,
displacement, ethnicity, and refugees.

Postdoctoral Fellow Appointed

Christy DeLair has been appointed our

Postdoctoral Fellow in Museum Studies.
Christy is a specialist in global indigeneity and
well known to the Museum. A 2013 Brown
Anthropology Ph.D., she curated a wellreceived exhibit at the Haffenreffer Museum
entitled Crafting Origins: Creativity and
Continuity in Indigenous Taiwan, which was the
Museums featured exhibit at Manning Hall
from November 2011 through November 2012.

Assemblages

The Assemblages Project

Robert Preucel
Director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology
John Smith
Director of the RISD Museum
The Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology and the RISD Museum of Art have initiated
Assemblages, a four-year project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This
project is the first major collaboration between our two museums and involves
expanding the theory and method of object-based teaching and learning. We are
excited about this project and hope it will serve as a basis for future collaborations
and as a model for other university-based anthropology and art museums.

The organizing concept is the idea of the

assemblage. This term has a variety of
meanings derived from its diverse uses in
the disciplines of art, art history, literature,
archaeology, anthropology, and science studies,
among many other fields. We seek to work across
these different meanings as we explore the shape
and contours of key representational issues in art
and society. Our method involves breaking down
the digital/analog divide by exploring the use and
interpretation of collections in their relational
contexts. We are also interested in developing
object-based teaching pedagogy that enables
students to foster deeper relationships with
objects and their digital representations.
Our project is directly linked to the distinctive
missions and strategic plans of our two
institutions. It will enhance Brown Universitys
commitment to intellectual creativity,
collaboration, and social purpose to achieve
greater levels of academic distinction by uniting
innovative education and outstanding research to
benefit the community, the nation, and the world.
It will also contribute to the RISD Museums
mission to interpret works of art and design
representing diverse cultures from ancient times
to the present. It will further RISD Colleges new
initiative to provide increased opportunities for
faculty research.

Background

The Museum community, including universitybased art museums and anthropology museums,
is deeply entangled in a series of key debates
about the interrelationships of culture and
society. One line of investigation has addressed
art and aesthetics. From this perspective, art is
valued because it facilitates the contemplation

of transcendent human values. A second focus

is on art and civilization. Here art is approached
as an index of cultural progress or evolutionary
stage, often with the idea of a linear progression
from craft to fine art. A third focus is on art and
commodification. This perspective examines the
circulation of art from contexts of production
to contexts of exhibition and examines the
construction of value through the art market and
the practices of connoisseurship.
These approaches have been and continue to
be critiqued from a variety of perspectives and
in an increasingly globalized art environment.
For example, anthropologists have observed
that there is no category that corresponds with
the Western concept of art in most indigenous
cultures. This insight shifts the focus from art
as a universal human expression to the idea of
making as universal human practice. Similarly,
anthropologists and science studies scholars
have challenged the idea of art as an index of
cultural progress and have begun to reexamine
the complex interrelationships of technology
and society. Finally, artists and art historians
have questioned the commodification process as
representing the end of art and considered the
circulation of objects in local and global contexts
as creative processes in their own right.
Artists and anthropologists have recently taken
inspiration from each others fieldwork.
These scholars are exploring the techniques
of artmaking and the methods of engaging
with communities as models for new crossdisciplinary collaborations. The Assemblages
project seeks to build on this movement by
interrogating the kinds of interpretive and
semiotic practices that characterize our
associations with objects, broadly defined. We are
particularly interested in examining the spheres

Assemblages

of value that are produced by the circulation of

objects and their images. For example, some of
the most interesting contemporary work involves
visualizing patterns of dissemination after art
objects are created, and studying the diverse

networks into which they enter. This is a key topic

in David Joselits book After Art, and constitutes
what he calls a new epistemology of the search,
defined as the formatting and reformatting of
existing content.

On Assemblages
The term assemblage is a rich concept that crosses a wide variety of fields. In the visual
arts, it refers to the making of artistic compositions by putting together found objects. In
archaeology, the term describes a group of artifacts found in close temporal and spatial
association, that is to say, in context. In literary studies, assemblage is a key analytical
concept related to desire and the state of becoming. In science studies, assemblage is
linked to heterogeneous networks of people and things.

Roseanne Somerson, President of

RISD, Robert W. Preucel, Director
of the Haffenreffer Museum of
Anthropology, and John Smith,
Director of the RISD Museum, at
the inaugural luncheon for the
Assemblages Project.

Project Components
1) W
 e are creating a group of Mellon Teaching
Fellows drawn from the faculties of both of our
institutions. These scholars are making use
of our collections in their teaching pedagogy,
they are developing innovative exhibitions, and
they are conducting cutting-edge research. We
expect that a significant number of students
(approximately 100) will be involved in these
innovative courses over the term of the project.

3) We are establishing an annual seminar on

topics related to the material and digital
interfaces of art, anthropology, and society.
Digitization has magnified the separation of
objects from their physical qualities, thereby
changing the material foundations of cultural
production. These seminars will allow our
fellows and students to engage with nationally
recognized scholars.

2) W
 e are establishing annual teaching
workshops led by our staff to introduce fellows
and other interested faculty to best practices
related to object-based teaching. Fellows
will also lead a workshop reporting on the
outcomes of their pedagogical experiences
at the ends of their appointments.

4) We are communicating the project outcomes

to the public, interested scholars, and museum
professionals both online and in collaborative
publications and projects.

Assemblages Mellon Teaching Fellows

2015 term
Vazira Zamindar is Assistant
Professor of History at Brown
University. She works at the
intersection of anthropology and
history with an interest in crossborder histories for rethinking
a divided South Asia, as well as
the politics of violence and its
impact on the writing of history.
Her book, The Long Partition and
the Making of Modern South Asia:
Refugees, Boundaries, Histories,
was published by Columbia
University Press in 2007; Indian
and Pakistani editions came
out in 2008. She is presently
working on a second book
on the history of archaeology
and war on the northwest frontier of British
India, bordering Afghanistan, and has received
the International Institute of Asian Studies
Fellowship, the Fulbright, and the National
Endowment for Humanities Fellowship, amongst
others, for this project.

Jane South is a practicing

artist and part-time
faculty member in the
Department of Sculpture
at the Rhode Island
School of Design and
Pratt Institute (New
York). She has held
solo exhibitions at The
Aldrich Contemporary Art
Museum (Ridgefield, CT),
the Weatherspoon Art
Museum (Greensboro,
NC), Spencer Brownstone
Gallery (New York), and
Susanne Vielmetter Los
Angeles Projects. Her
work was included in
Burgeoning Geometries: Constructed Abstractions
at the Whitney Museum of American Art at
Altria in 2007 and SLASH: Paper Under the Knife
at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York)
in 2010. Other exhibitions include The Drawing
Center (NY), Williams College Museum of Art
(Williamstown, MA), Albright-Knox Art Gallery
(Buffalo, NY), the Pennsylvania Academy of the
Fine Arts (Philadelphia, PA), and Mass MoCA,
(North Adams, MA).

2015-2016 term
Graham Oliver is Professor
of Classics and History at
Brown University. He teaches
undergraduate and graduate
courses in Greek history and
literature and has directed and
taught international graduate
programs in epigraphy at Oxford
University and the British School
at Athens. He has authored,
edited, or co-edited numerous
books including The Epigraphy
of Death: Studies in the History
and Society of Greece and Rome
(Liverpool University Press,
2000), Hellenistic Economies
(Routledge, 2001), and War, Food,
and Politics in Early Hellenistic
Athens (Oxford University Press, 2007). He has
recently co-edited a collection of essays, Cultures
of Commemoration: War Memorials, Ancient and
Modern (Oxford University Press, 2012), which
examines commemorative practices in Western
culture from the fifth century B.C.E. through the
World Wars and to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Multidisciplinary design
practitioner, artist, and
RISD educator Amy
Leidtke is an engaged
scholar with over twenty
years professional
experience in research,
participatory design,
strategic and master
planning, exhibit and
product development
and design, curriculum
design, educational
symposia, and public
speaking. Sample RISD
studio courses include
Curiosita: Practical
Applications for Innovative
Thinking, Introduction to Industrial Design,
Sketching and Rendering for Industrial Design,
Nature-Inspired Design Innovation, and Industrial
Design Graduate Studio. Recent independent
research activities involve creating design
education products and experiences for K-12
students and educators.

Assemblages

Prologue - Staging Still Life:

The Mute Object Speaks
Jane South, Department of Sculpture, RISD
Mellon Teaching Fellow
As an artist who began in the theater and evolved
through performance and painting into sculpture
and installation, I have long been intrigued by the
many roles that objects enact in different cultures
and contexts.
The opportunity of a 2015 RISD Andrew W. Mellon
Teaching Fellowship at the Haffenreffer Museum
of Anthropology is a gift of time and access with
which I might explore how objects participate in
the world, to inquire into their capacity to inhabit
and shift habitations amongst and between
definitions and contexts, and to ponder the
terrains of slippage that objects perform between
such presumed binaries as animate/inanimate,
functional/nonfunctional, art/artifact.
My Fellowship work is evolving as I explore the
Haffenreffers collections through the lens of
performativity. Seeking to activate discussion
and experimentation around some of the notions
outlined above, each stage of investigation will
involve the creation of a work and/or event that
performs a scenario within which these terrains
of slippage might be enacted.
It seems natural, when speaking of performing
and enacting, to frame these stages within the
language and structure of theater. The first
stage, recently exhibited as part of the 2015 RISD
Faculty Biennial, is therefore titled: Prologue Staging Still Life: The Mute Object Speaks. In this
work, live video feed from a still life staged at
the Haffenreffer Museums Collections Research
Center in Bristol, RI, was projected onto a wallmounted construction at the RISD Museum. The
object-participants in this still life (which mimics
the kind of set-up commonly seen in a still life
painters studio or an art school) were curated
from the Haffenreffers collection to perform
in the theatrical space of the still life and coexist alongside other objects/representations of
objects from sources outside of the Haffenreffers
collection. These foreign or non-privileged
objects served to complicate and elucidate ideas
of object status and relationsmaking visible
(dis)connections across media, time, and context.
On a shelf jutting from the wall-mounted
construction, and beneath the live still life
video projection, sat Joseph Beuys CapriBatterie (loaned by the RISD Museum). As the
only real object in the assembly, this work
enacted multiple roles; performing as Master
of Ceremonies to link the two museums and
acting as sculpture, alchemical artifact, and high-

Jane Souths Prologue, on display in the 2015 RISD Faculty Biennial

exhibition, projects a live image of her still life from the Haffenreffer
Museums Collections Research Center in Bristol. The still life in Bristol
is shown on Contexts front cover; on the back cover is the projected
image, as seen in the Biennial exhibition.

value (authenticated) commodity, while further

articulating complex conceptual sitings across
diverse territories.
Moving forward from Prologue, I anticipate
extending these ideas of performance and
theatrical staging to new sites and contexts,
further activating objects from the Haffenreffer
collection by introducing them to unfamiliar
settings, co-stars, and relationships. It is my
hope to engage communities at Brown, RISD, and
beyond by staging works/events to demonstrate
how much these mute objects really have to say.

Assemblages

Digital Translations
Sophia Sobers
Department of Digital + Media
Mellon Photography Assistant

Since starting as the Mellon Photography

Assistant this past February on a project to
expand the accessibility of the museums
collections, I have spent much time thinking and
working with objects, their stories, and how to
represent them through the camera. Although a
picture is worth a thousand words, I have realized
while photographing Taino objects how important
lighting is to help display a story, add dramatic
effects to otherwise unobtrusive objects, produce
expressive faces, bring out faded colors, or
highlight details.
This experience has made me reflect on the
act of translating physical objects into digital
images that will ultimately exist only on a
screen. Even with a scale, a sense of their size
and volume can be lost in translation, and the
experience of moving a pot that looks sturdy but
feels fragile is something difficult to translate.
Thus the photographers tools - backdrop,
lighting, aperture and lens - become the new
media on which an object must rely for an
accurate translation into its digital self; while
the camera becomes the filter through which to
process that object.

You, the reader, will ultimately view these

images through databases, web browsers,
phone applications, email, and other media
still to be developed; interacting with them
using your mouse, track pad, or finger. Through
this interaction, each and every object travels
through multiple filters before reaching its final
destination on the screen. I shall end with a
question I believe is relevant in the early 21st
century, and one that I shall ruminate on as I
continue this photographic journey - how can
distant or different cultural objects hold a sense
of presence in this digital age?

Teaching

Global History of Art and Architecture

Courtney J. Martin
Assistant Professor, Department of History of Art and Architecture
Faculty Fellow
As a 2014-15 Faculty Fellow, I was able to draw
on the expertise of the Haffenreffer Museums
staff and its expansive collection to shape the
course that I co-taught with Professor Sheila
Bonde in fall 2014, Global History of Art and
Architecture. This new course ventured away
from traditional art historical surveys that
often ignore, or diminish, art and architecture
produced outside of Western Europe toward one
in which objects from Africa, the Americas, and
Asia were considered part of the larger history
of art and architecture.
One of our lectures, Imperial Benin and Its
Global Consumption: The Benin Bronzes (13th
century-1897), drew on the history, use, reception,
and circulation of Benin bronzes. Professor
Bonde and I met with Haffenreffer staff to learn
more about the cultural and material concerns of
these objects, specifically those contained within
the Museums collection. The Museum placed
a selection of these on view in Manning Hall so
that students could view and, in some cases,

handle them during the week of the Benin bronze

lecture. This interaction was a very important
pedagogical moment for us students engaged
with objects they were learning about in class
and our graduate teaching assistants learned to
handle museum objects and lead discussions with
actual art objects rather than reproductions. This
was a useful professional development exercise
for our graduate students, many of whom are
interested in curatorial careers.
We also used two African objects from the
Haffenreffers collection a 19th century
terracotta and a 19th century brass as subjects
for one of the three required paper assignments.
For this assignment, students compared and
contrasted the formal and functional qualities of
these objects with others located at the Rhode
Island School of Design Museum. In addition to
encouraging student writing about artwork, this
assignment showed them how to use museums
as scholarly resources.

Who Owns the Past?

Patricia Rubertone
Professor, Department
of Anthropology
Faculty Fellow
This spring, I taught Who Owns the Past?, a
first-year undergraduate class examining why
the archaeological past matters. The class
examined how objects, sites, monuments, and
human remains are valued, claimed, and used by
different stakeholders and encouraged students
to think about the meaning of responsible
citizenship and ethical stewardship and to
participate in engaged scholarship by listening
to voices from the local historical preservation,
museum, Native American, and African
American communities.
The Faculty Fellows program provided critical
opportunities to enrich the course and achieve
its goals. We examined soapstone bowls from
the Museums New England collections to
learn about the regions stone landscapes, the
challenges in preserving them, and the collecting
habits of early antiquarians. The bowls, made
4,000-5,000 years ago from soapstone quarried
at outcrops like the Ochee Springs Quarry in
Johnston, Rhode Island, helped students make

connections between in-situ depressions, cuts,

and partial bowls shown in photographs of
that site and finished objects in the Museums
collections. One of the students, Ashley Aldridge,
said that seeing the bowls taught her more
about the way they were carved, the people who
made them and what they were used for based
on their shapes, handles, sizes, and markings
helped bring them to life. The larger lesson was
that so-called mysterious stone ruins found
locally and throughout the world might not be as
enigmatic as some have claimed.

Teaching

The class also visited CultureLab, where Thierry

Gentiss case-by-case, object-based discussion
helped them understand the challenges
museums face in complying with NAGPRA and
international antiquity laws. Isabelle Williams
said that learning about objects and their
histories made the implications of repatriation for
institutions and communities that she had only
read about seem more real. These opinions were
echoed as students worked on research projects

using the Museums collections to explore

whether certain objects would be repatriable
under NAGPRA or whether the Museum should
accept or reject certain objects based on its
policies and a countrys antiquity laws. Expanding
students learning experiences beyond the
traditional classroom and through objects made
a huge difference in teaching about why the past
matters so fiercely to different stakeholders.

Golden Splendor and the

Anthropology Museum
Ian Straughn
Joukowsky Family Middle East Studies Librarian
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Precious metals do not immediately come to
mind when thinking about anthropology museum
collections such as at the Haffenreffer. Other
materials ceramic, stone, wood, iron, etc.
dominate its shelves and drawers; still, on a
whim, I approached my colleagues to see what
might be tucked away in Bristol to support a
new course I developed for Anthropology: Gold:
the Culture of a Barbarous Relic. Both the
curators and I were surprised to discover how
many objects, even if not made entirely of gold
themselves, could articulate the ways in which
this element has participated in the cultural lives
of peoples past and present.
It is something of a truism in the museum world
that if you can get gold into the exhibition title and
advertise with some glittering jewel-encrusted
object, your visitor numbers will spike. In the
context of our course, objects were chosen for
display in Manning Hall and for hands-on
examination in CultureLab, allowing students to
reflect on those very museum practices that often
give gold a place of honor at the expense of other
materials. While many objects demonstrated the
materialization of power and authority or golds

10

role in various ritual and symbolic practices,

others permitted students to examine close
connections of gold to the body, whether through
forms of adornment or the various funerary
contexts in which much archaeological gold is
found. Serendipitously, the adjacent display of
university regalia, with its many golden
references to the ritual performances of
European aristocracy and political elites,
reinforced these connections.
Nevertheless, as Shakespeare famously penned,
all that glitters is not gold, and in our work
with the Museums collections we were fortunate
to compare our golden treasures to artifacts
such as the coppers of the Pacific North West
that provided cross-cultural balance to our
perceptions of value. Gold in the museum, we
discovered, was something of a double-edged
sword. While we might capitalize on its power to
grab our attention and draw us into conversations
about an object and the culture that produced it,
our own cultural fascination with this rare metal
could equally predetermine, even stifle, the ways
in which we allow particular artifacts to speak.

Research

Return to Taiwan: Laying the Foundation

for New Research on Indigenous Artists
and Museums
Christy DeLair
Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology and Museum Studies
This winter I returned to Taiwan for the first time
since collecting contemporary indigenous crafts
with a grant from the Haffenreffer Museum of
Anthropology in the summer of 2011. The purpose
of this trip was twofold. First, I reconnected with
artists and shared with them research results
including pictures of their art on display in our
2011 exhibit Crafting Origins. Second, I laid the
foundation for a new project on indigenous
artists relations with museums in Taiwan,
their collaborations on exhibits and access to
collections, and how these engagements help
shape contemporary artistic expressions and
perceptions of community heritage.
Having been away for several years, a number of
changes were pronounced. These included an
increase in tourism, particularly from mainland
China, and the development of supporting
infrastructure such as high-speed trains, large
hotels, and entertainment complexes. The price
of indigenous art has jumped, in some cases
doubling or tripling. Most artists have been able
to sustain their businesses. More can now focus
solely on art, support the building of new cultural
centers, and hire family or community members
to deal with the increasing tourist traffic. While
they are concerned about the direction of

development in their communities and the impact

on the environment, they are also hopeful that
younger generations are taking an active interest
in their heritage.
My new project draws significantly from
established relationships with artists in Taitung,
but is expanding to include artists from around
the island. Artists frequently conduct museum
research while developing artistic skills and
knowledge of traditional styles and meanings,
some even traveling abroad to access collections,
particularly in Japan. Other artists curate and
collaborate on museum exhibits, or participate
in international exchange programs run through
museums. Through analysis of these interactions
and networks, I explore how artists engagements
with museums help shape the development of
indigenous identity and community.
I am also building connections with museum
professionals, including curators at the National
Taiwan Museum currently working on projects
to improve indigenous communities access to
collections and share curatorial authority. Their
goals closely align with the practical aims of my
research - to understand and improve indigenous
communities access to their cultural heritage
held by museums worldwide.

Ketagalan Culture Center, a

small museum serving urban
indigenous communities in
Beitou District, Taipei, Taiwan.

11

Research

In Search of Embudo
Robert W. Preucel
Director of the Haffenreffer
Museum of Anthropology
Severin M. Fowles
Department of Anthropology,
Columbia University
On January 29, 1694, Diego de Vargas, the
Governor of New Mexico, captured a Pueblo
Indian at Namb Pueblo. The man, named
Nicolas, related that he had come to Namb with
another Indian to get maize to take to the outpost
they called Embudo. He described its location
as being next to the box canyon of the Rio del
Norte on the way to Picuris Pueblo from San
Juan Pueblo. He reported that the Tano Indians
from San Lazaro and San Cristobal Pueblos
were there, as well as most of the inhabitants of
Tesuque Pueblo. Vargas was disturbed to learn
this information. Embudo, and the other mesatop
villages established by the Northern Rio Grande
pueblos after the Revolt of 1680, represented
severe threats to his reconquest program.
Archaeologists have only recently begun to
document systematically these mesa villages
and interpret their social roles in the post-Pueblo
Revolt period. The senior author has conducted
archaeological survey and mapping at Kotyiti (Old
Cochiti) in the Cochiti district. Matt Liebmann has
mapped Patokwa, Astialakwa, Boletsakwa and

Archaic panel
possibly relocated
to trailhead
grid north

datum

Tra
il
= Smeared Indented Corrugated sherd

= Archaic panel

= obsidian flake

= Catholic panel

= metal object

= other panel

12

true N

Last summer, the authors identified a possible

candidate for the Embudo outpost. The site (LA
179595), located on private land, is a rectangular
pueblo with basalt slab footings. Very few dividing
walls are preserved within the roomblocks. There
is evidence for an entrance or opening in the east
wall. There is a historic torreon built on top of the
southwest corner. The site is located adjacent to
a basalt talus slope containing rock art dating to
the Archaic, Pueblo, and Historic periods.
With the assistance of Fowles field crew, Dick
Ford, Charlie Haecker, Woody Aguilar, and local
volunteers, we conducted a surface survey of
the site. We were especially interested in
identifying diagnostic artifacts that might
help us determine the period of occupation.
Unfortunately, we found only a few utility ware
sherds that may date to the Coalition period
(12001325). Charlie performed a metal detector
survey and located a penny whistle, possibly used
by a Hispanic sheepherder. Lindsay Montgomery
prepared a detailed site map.
At present, we are exploring several different
interpretations. Because of the lack of
construction materials, Sev wondered if the
village had ever been completed. Dick suggested
that the basalt slabs may have been foundations
for a jacal superstructure. Bob thinks that it is an
historic site, since it doesnt look like the Coalition
period Tewa villages. So have we found Embudo?
Only more research will tell!

LA 179595
= large Archaic panel with Late Pueblo additions

Cerro Colorado (Old Zia) in the Jemez district.

Joseph Woody Aguilar is currently conducting
dissertation research on Black Mesa in the Tewa
district. Significantly, each of these projects has
been conducted in close collaboration with the
descendant communities.

grid N

20 m

Research

Building Bridges from Cloth

Michle Hayeur Smith
Museum Research Associate

My NSF funded research project, Weaving Islands

of Cloth, is a comparative examination of textiles as
primary evidence for womens labor and roles in
the Norse colonies of the North Atlantic that
developed from the 9th-19th centuries into the
modern nations of Iceland, Scotland, the Faroe
Islands, and Greenland.
This year I expanded my focus to examine Greenlandic, Faroese, and Scottish textiles from the
Viking Age into the 17th century, while continuing
work on Icelandic collections. This has been particularly fruitful in documenting how the products
women made changed over the course of a millennium in the different North Atlantic colonies.
For example, while Icelandic women industrially
produced textiles to be used as currency through
the Middle Ages, Greenlanders products appear to
have shifted through time in response to local climatic and social hardships. The Faroese and Scottish Norse trajectories are just beginning to emerge
from the data but already seem different and
complex. Thanks to this research, Weaving Islands
of Cloth now forms part of a collaborative research
project on Danish colonial political economy during
the early modern period, organized by Dr. Gavin
Lucas of the University of IcelandCommodity Entanglement, The Archaeology of the Trade Monopoly.

Through collaborative research, we have begun to

expand and pioneer new approaches to documenting the production and circulation of these textiles.
For example, work with Dr. Karin Frei (National
Museum of Denmark) is using strontium isotopes
to characterize local cloth from Icelandic sites,
document imports, and hopefully identify where
they were made. DNA research with Mikkel Holger
Stander Sinding (University of Copenhagen) is documenting the ways that Greenlandic farmers shifted
farming strategies at the start of the Little Ice Age
by identifying the different species whose hair was
added to cloth as conditions for sheep farming deteriorated. AMS dating, coupled with analyses of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in wool clothing, is also
allowing me, with colleagues at the Haffenreffer
and the National Museum of Denmark, to document
long-term recycling of cloth in Greenland, while
collaborative work using pXRF is showing promise
for tracking the movement of cloth at the inter- and
intra-regional levels.
Thanks to this research, Weaving Islands of Cloth is
building bridges across the North Atlantic as broad
as the networks over which cloth once moved. These
new connections are leading to the development of
pioneering analytical techniques with Scandinavian
colleagues and their integration into trans-regional
and trans-disciplinary research collaborations that
link the Haffenreffer Museum to research groups
in national museums and universities across the
North Atlantic and northern Europe.

13

Research

Color Matters: The Selection and Use of

Lithic Raw Materials in Late Prehistoric
New England
Kevin P. Smith
Deputy Director/Chief Curator
In the early twentieth century, Rudolf
Haffenreffer amassed one of New Englands
largest archaeological collections by purchasing
artifacts from farmers and collectors around
the Narragansett Basin. In his day these
artifacts could not be dated; and with little to
say about them, his interest waned. However,
over the past 70 years radiocarbon dating has
allowed prehistoric sites, and the artifacts
found within them, to be assigned to different
periods in North Americas 13,000-year
archaeological record. Today, the objects
in Haffenreffers collection can be
assigned ages through comparison
with well-dated styles.
In recent years, I have been
working through Haffenreffers
collections with students,
assigning type designations to the
artifacts, then plotting them on maps to visualize
changes through time. One of the most striking
patterns is an abrupt change in raw material use
and color choices in the last centuries before
European contact. The Narragansett and Boston
Basins provide sources of stone suitable for
making tools in a wide range of colors: white
quartz; yellow jasper; green argillites; red
felsite; black, grey, and beige rhyolites. Through
most of New Englands prehistory, all of these
raw materials were used; their frequencies on
different sites generally reflecting the use of
the nearest sources. During the Late Middle
Woodland Jacks Reef period, ca. 650-1000 AD,
all of these colors were used, with yellow jasper
becoming especially important and possibly
obtained from sources up to 300 kilometers
distant.
However, around 1000 AD, at the start of the Late
Woodland period, this changed radically.
Sources of red, black, and white stone
became almost exclusively used, with
arrow points of these three colors
found in roughly similar proportions
on all sites across the region.
The anthropologist George
Hamell, among others,
noted that Northeastern
indigenous communities
at the time of European
contact viewed red, black,

14

and white as a symbolically potent color triad. In

the body paints used to denote personal states
of being, in ceremonial dress, and in objects
deployed within political or ritual contexts, white
represented social states of being (e.g. peace,
law, and power), black was associated with asocial
states of being (e.g. death, mourning, solemnity,
and ancestral authority), and red symbolized
antisocial but highly active or emotionally charged
states of being, including war.
We cannot simplistically assume from this that
red arrows were associated with war, white
with peace, and so on; although it might well be
reasonable to infer that the intentional selection
of stone types with color symbolism for
the production of objects with clear
indexical symbolic value, as tools of
aggression or production, might
suggest meanings incorporating
these valences. Yet
the simultaneous
recognition that these
raw materials were
also moved over considerable
distances to assemble
comparable assemblages of red,
white, and black arrow points
at sites across the region suggests that
those meanings were potentially more
nuanced than direct equivalences and
were activated in practice by shared
understandings of where the materials
were quarried, by whom they were
acquired, how they were distributed, and
whether there were specific contexts in
which their selection could incorporate
both performative and indexical referents.
Regardless of how these objects were
interpreted in use, the sudden and ubiquitous
shift, at the start of the Late Woodland period,
to the use of stone types mirroring the red/
white/black color symbolism documented for
the Contact period, seems likely to mark an
important ideological or cultural shift among
the people of this region. While we may not yet
now exactly what those changes signified, this
pattern has never before been documented and
this new clue from Haffenreffers old collections
is allowing us to pose innovative new questions
about New Englands indigenous history.

Research

The Beat of a Different Drum: Drum

Production and Use Among Northern Peoples
Christopher B. Wolff
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, SUNY-Plattsburgh
Museum Research Associate
In 2014, I began a new research project, in collaboration with archaeologist Tim Rast, to study the use
and production of drums in the Arctic. Our research began with an interest in studying the enigmatic
Dorset Paleoeskimo drums and shamanic paraphernalia recovered from the Button Point Site on
Bylot Island, Nunavut. These fascinating drums led me to expand my research to examine drum
traditions broadly among Arctic and Subarctic cultures. A focus of this research is the examination of
the historical relationships between prehistoric cultures through new analyses of drum production
and the sharing of musical traditions within contexts of shamanism, storytelling, and other ceremonial
practices, many of which prominently featured the drum. This study may provide key information
about cultural interactions among pre-contact northern cultures and the degrees to which they were
transformed by contact and colonialism, early missionization, and assimilation efforts that, in places,
forbade the use of the drum.
Musical traditions, particularly those associated with religious
activities, are often culturally distinct and conservative,
allowing few changes that may affect the efficacy
of the performance. Therefore, we expect that
drumming traditions may incorporate
distinct cultural practices that could be
recognized through high-resolution
studies of drum styles and
musical performances. Early
analyses we conducted at
the Canadian Museum of
History demonstrated just
thatclear typological
distinctions between
the Dorset drums and
Historic Inuit styles.
One of the next
drums to be studied
is a small one,
initially identified
as a toy drum,
collected by J.
Louis Giddings
and his crew at
Cape Krusenstern,
Alaska, and now in
the collections of the
Haffenreffer Museum.
Examined together
with its associated
archaeological
assemblage and context,
this rare instrument will
extend our knowledge of these
traditions into the pre-contact
Thule period of Inuit history and,
along with the Button Point drums,
will provide the foundation for a multiyear ethnoarchaeological study of past and
present drum use and production around the
circumpolar north.

15

Research

Scientific Testing of the Luristan Bronzes at

the Haffenreffer Museum
Mge Durusu-Tanrver

Graduate Student, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World

Brett Kaufman

Postdoctoral Fellow, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World

David Elitzer

Undergraduate Student, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World

Susan E. Alcock

Director of the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
The corpus of artifacts collectively known as
Luristan bronzes, dating to 1300-650 BCE and
originating from the Luristan region of Western
Iran, rank among the most problematic of
archaeological artifacts. Numerous museum
examples have dubious archaeological
provenance, since they came from illegal rather
than controlled excavations and were then sold
on the art market. Further, their portability and
charm make them good candidates for forgery.
The Haffenreffer Museum has 20 Luristan
bronzes with poorly understood provenances and
dates. Mge Durusu-Tanrver cataloged them
during a Joukowsky Institute proctorship with the
Haffenreffer Museum in 2012. At the end of this
project, which used stylistic and archival evidence,
many questions regarding the authenticity of
the artifacts arose, and scientific analysis was
envisioned to be the next step.

In November 2014, we started our investigation

with portable X-Ray Fluorescence spectroscopy
(pXRF), a non-destructive and non-invasive
technology that enables us to ascertain the
artifacts elemental signatures and assess
their consistency with known historical alloys.
This work is now complete, and we are in the
process of interpreting the results using recently
published archaeometallurgical data for Luristantype artifacts from archaeological excavations of
Iranian sites, such as Sangtarashan, as well as
from testing different ores from the area.
Our next steps are conducting pXRF analysis on
the Luristan bronzes from the collections of the
RISD Museum, disseminating our results through
publications, and assembling an exhibition
bringing together the collections of the two
museums.

Presumed Luristan bracelet,

whose composition is consistent
with ancient alloys as shown by
XRF analysis.

New Perspectives on West Mexican Figurines

Kellie Roddy
Undergraduate Student, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and
the Ancient World
For my undergraduate thesis I am examining
a group of West Mexican figurines from the
Museums collections. Studies of prehistoric
West Mexico face a difficult paradox- thousands
of sculptures and figurines held by museums
pique interest in the area, but the looting that
provided these objects has eliminated much of the
archaeological context needed to understand them.
These sculptures and figurines reflect a
remarkable, but poorly understood, ceramic
tradition. They are known to come from shaft
tombs found in western Mexico, but only recently
has archaeological evidence started to illuminate
their original cultural contexts.

16

My goal is to place the Museums figurines into

that broader context by conducting both stylistic
and instrumental analyses. The stylistic analysis
relates the Haffenreffer figurines to objects in
other museum collections and uses
existing typologies to assign them
to regional styles using existing
typologies. The instrumental
analysis employs semiquantitative X-Ray Fluorescence
to obtain elemental
fingerprints of the figures
ceramic matrix in order
to examine questions of
standardization among the
pieces and to identify repaired
or reconstructed areas
on the objects themselves.

Collections

Kevin P. Smith
Deputy Director/Chief Curator
In May 2014, I was surprised when a colleague
in arctic research, Stephen Loring, wrote to ask
whether the Haffenreffer Museum would be
interested in a collection of Maya artifacts from
the estate of a distant relative, John C. Scheffler,
who had accompanied E. Wyllys Andrews IV to
Mexico in the early 1960s on Tulanes project to
map the ancient Maya city of Dzibilchaltn. Mr.
Scheffler never returned to archaeology after
that expedition, but he acquired a large collection
there that his heirs sought to place in a university

museum where it could inspire a new

generation of students and scholars. This fall,
John Schefflers collection and meticulously
organized photographs and documentation
came to the Haffenreffer Museum. Nick Carter,
a recently minted Brown Mayanist, assisted as
we opened the boxes containing the collection.
As it emerged, he helped us see patterns in
the collection that continue to excite us. Nicks
thoughts, below, provide a sense of the wonder
and potential in this collection.

Unpacking the Past:

The John C. Scheffler Teaching Collection
Nicholas P. Carter
Adjunct Lecturer in Anthropology
When I was invited to examine the Scheffler
collection, I suspected I was in for a treat. I
wasnt disappointed: from boxes and newspaper
wrappings came jade beads and clay spindle
whorls, ceramic pots and vases, ornaments and
sculptural fragments. Examining the collection, I
came to realize thatapart from a few whimsical
fakesthe pieces were genuinely Mesoamerican
and ancient, and would make valuable teaching
resources for the Museum and Brown.
Many of the vessels are stylistically similar, made
from a fine, high-fired, orange clay, slipped and
polished to a high sheen. Bands of geometric or
pseudoglyphic designs, painted in black or incised
with a fine point, reinforce that similarity. One
has the impression that they could even have
come from a single workshop; but if so, broken
rims and root crazing suggest that it was a preColumbian one. I suspect an origin for these
vessels in the northern Yucatan Peninsula during
the Late Postclassic period (ca. A.D. 1200 1519),
where Mr. Scheffler bought them (as a single lot?)
from a dealer in Mrida. A few pieces came from

points farther west: the pottery heads of a jaguar

and an enigmatically smiling ritual celebrant are
typical of Late Classic (ca. A.D. 600 830) coastal
Veracruz. Particularly interesting are a pair of
earflares carved from marine shell and covered
at one time with bark paper glued on with resin,
most of which has worn away. These may be
unique in the archaeological record but seem to
find an artistic parallel in Late Postclassic art
from northern Maya centers. There, gods and
priests wear brightly colored earflares hung with
streamers made of cloth, or, as the Scheffler
earspools suggest, of bark paper.
The Scheffler collection has already been
an invaluable teaching resource. Graduate
and undergraduate students in my course on
archaeological illustration have been gathering
weekly in CultureLab to examine, photograph, and
draw its pots and ornaments. Getting gloves-on
experience with these pieces has excited their
interest in archaeology and museum studies, or
so Id like to think.

17

New Acquisitions
Thierry Gentis, Curator/NAGPRA Coordinator
Significant collections, including 639 objects from
Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe, the Caribbean, and
Oceania, along with two photographic collections with
168 images were added to the Museums collections
this past year through purchases, bequests, and the
generosity of many benefactors. Donors have found
the Museum an appropriate home for their collections
in large part because of the Haffenreffers mission
to deploy its collections for research and education.
Indeed, many of these new acquisitions are already
in the Museums Manning Hall exhibition gallery and
CultureLab for use in teaching and student research.
Among these are a spectacular Pre-Columbian gold
ornament from the Tairona culture of Colombias
Caribbean coast, given by anonymous donors and
currently on display in CultureLab for Ian Straughns

18

class on gold (see page 10), and elements of a large

and important collection of Late and Post-Classic
Maya objects from northern Yucatan donated by the
estate of John C. Scheffler (see page 17). As with all
antiquities that enter the collections, these objects
and their acquisition records were scrutinized by
the Museums Collections Committee to ensure that
their acquisition meets the requirements set by the
Museums collections policy, the UNESCO Convention
of 1970, and relevant laws and treaties between the
United States and these objects countries of origin.
Satellite cases in the Rockefeller Library, the Roberts
Campus Center, and the Joukowsky Institute for
Archaeology and the Ancient World provide further
opportunities to share our collections with the greater
campus community and the public.

19

M
The objects and images on pages 18-21 represent a small sample of the new acquisitions accepted by the
Haffenreffer Museum this past year. Although space prevents us from showing all of these gifts or recognizing
all of our donors, these provide a sense of the richness and diversity of the donations.
A. N
 yamwezi healing figure, early 20th century, Tanzania.
Anonymous gift.

H. D
 etail from a textile with condors and camelids, mid-20th
century, Bolivia. Gift of Diana Baker.

B. E
 we shrine figure, 20th century, Togo. Gift of Cesare
Decredico.

I. M
 ikmaq birch bark box with porcupine quillwork, late 19th
century, Nova Scotia. Gift of Elizabeth Gebhard.

C. S
 hipibo janiform ceramic vessel, mid-20th century, Peru. Gift
of Edward Dwyer in memory of Jane P. Dwyer.

J. P
 re-Columbian Maya ceramic vessels, Mexico, primarily
Late Postcclassic, A.D. 1200-1519. The John C. Scheffler
Teaching Collection; gift of the John C. Scheffler estate.

D. T
 airona gold double spiral ornament, A.D. 1000-1500,
Colombia. Anonymous gift.
E. T
 aino ceramic figurative vessel spout, A.D. 1200-1500.
Dominican Republic. Gift of Lauren Butler Fay, Brown 01.
F. T
 aino bone carving of a Zemi (deity), A.D. 1200-1500,
Dominican Republic. Gift of Lauren Butler Fay, Brown 01.
G. T
 aino figurative stone pestle, A.D. 1200-1500, Dominican
Republic. Gift of Alison Collins Fay, Brown 99.

20

K. F
 on silver bracelet, early 20th century, Republic of Benin.
Gift of Dwight B. Heath and Anna Cooper.Heath.
L. T
 aino zoomorphic shell ornament, A.D. 1200-1500.
Dominican Republic. Gift of Lauren Butler Fay, Brown 01.
M. C
 hert retouched blade, Archaic period (ca. 2,000-4,000 BC),
Dominican Republic. Gift of Alison Collins Fay, Brown 99.

 oman spinning cotton in a workshop at Inle Lake, Myanmar, 2014. Photograph by Philip Lieberman.
W
Gift of Marcia Lieberman.

Documenting Our World

Anthony Belz, Guard/Greeter
Rip Gerry, Photographic Archivist/Exhibition Preparator
Kevin Smith, Deputy Director/Chief Curator

The Haffenreffer Museum not only collects

material culture but also collections of
photographs that document the ways that life
is lived around the world today. This year, the
Museum accepted a generous gift of photographs
taken in Myanmar by Philip Lieberman, the
George Hazard Crooker University Professor,
Emeritus, in the Department of Cognitive and
Linguistic Sciences, whose eye for composition
and content provides the museum with rich
opportunities to document the contrasts and
contradictions that exist between globalized
material culture and local cultural expressions in
all parts of the world today. These photographs
add to a collection of more than 400 photographs
and objects of material culture, primarily from
South Asia, donated over the years by Professor
Lieberman and his wife, Marcia Lieberman.

J. Louis Giddings (1909-1964), who came to

Brown from the University of Pennsylvania in
1956 as Associate Professor of Sociology and
the first director of the Haffenreffer Museum
of Anthropology. Through the Haffenreffer
familys donation of the Museum and Giddings
efforts, Browns Department of Anthropology
was born. His mission to involve students as full
colleagues in cutting-edge fieldwork, collections
management, and exhibition development
remains central to our mission today. Giddings
archives provide a record of interest to
archaeologists across the North, whose work
still relies on his discoveries, his keen perception
of large-scale patterns and fine detail, and his
early commitment to collaborative research with
indigenous communities.

The Museums archives also provide critical

documentation of our research and acquisitions,
supporting our collections in myriad ways.
This year, a major effort has been made to
bring together all of our records surrounding
the life and activities of the pioneering Arctic
archaeologist, anthropologist, and naturalist

21

Collections

Researching Great Lakes Collections

at the Haffenreffer
Ruth B. Phillips
Canada Research Chair and Professor
of Art History, Carleton University
I recently spent a day in the Haffenreffers storage
studying its North American Great Lakes collections
as a bonus of my recent trip to lecture at Brown.
I am delighted that the museum will partner with
the GRASAC Knowledge Sharing database (GKS),
a collaborative project bringing together material
culture, historical photographs, depictions,
documents, and Indigenous language resources
in repositories around the world. GKS is the key
research platform of the Great Lakes Research
Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Culture
(GRASAC). This collaboration of researchers was
founded in 2003. GRASACs goals are to stimulate
and support individual and collaborative research
on Great Lakes Indigenous histories and forms of
expressive culture and to facilitate on-line access to
heritage for members of Indigenous communities.
The project has received major funding from the
Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada, and the Premiers Discovery Award of the
Province of Ontario. It has also been supported by
its two key Indigenous partners, the Ojibwe Cultural
Foundation and the Woodlands Cultural Centre
in Ontario and the generous in-kind contributions
of museums, large and small, in North America,
Europe, and New Zealand.
With the help of the Museum staff, I viewed the
Haffenreffers collection and discussed its history.
We opened drawers and scanned shelves to gain a
sense of the scope of the Haffenreffers holdings,
which include magnificent beaded bandolier bags,
birch bark boxes ornamented with porcupine quills or
designs scraped into the bark, cradleboards, crooked
knives, corn husk dolls, and calling card trays and
feather fans exquisitely embroidered in moosehair.
We also laid plans for a second phase of work. This
summer, GRASAC will fund two PhD candidates
from Carleton University to travel to Bristol to take
detailed, high resolution photographs and record
the collection for GRASACs database. Alexandra
Nahwegahbow is Anishinaabe from Manitoulin Island
and is writing her dissertation on cradleboards and
the material culture of child rearing, while Wahsontiio
Cross is Mohawk from the Kahnawake community
outside Montreal and is writing on historic and
contemporary Haudenosaunee beadwork. We would
also very much like to engage Brown students in the
ongoing work and, as a contributing institution, the
Haffenreffer will automatically become a partner in
the project with full access to the GKS. We very much
look forward to working together in the future.

22

Collections

Lost Museum Found

Emily Avera
Graduate Student, Department of Anthropology
Bryan Markovitz
Graduate Student, Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies
Students affiliated with Browns Program in Science
and Technology Studies worked with the Haffenreffer
to create a project for Browns Lost Museums
Symposium to be held this spring.
The group focused on exploring the Museums
collections through artistic practices that responded
to the Symposiums themes, including loss and
forgetting. For example, they studied a Baoul
mouse oracle (gbekre) from Cte dIvoire that
requires a largely unknown form of apprenticeship
with a diviner to use.
To learn more about such objects, the group
conducted studies using catalog records, video
walks through the collections, sketches, library
research, and even X-Ray Fluorescence spectroscopy
scanning to make material replicas, or surrogates
of the objects for interactions beyond the museum.
By making surrogates, Emily explained, we
could learn from the objects qualities and find ways
to reinterpret its meaning in relation to life in the
present. The surrogates took on a number of forms,
from paper maquettes and illustrations to songs and
scenarios performed around the city.

The groups interests in science and technology

studies also led them to question how knowledge is
produced in the museum. In searching the collections
with staff, they were able to observe the Museums
collections management systems and discuss various
issues that govern the care of collections. They also
explored the ways that their own inquiry eventually
took on the form of an archive of its own.
Museums are passive storehouses, Bryan noted.
Our goal was to experiment with creative ways
to transform our encounter with material culture
into new objects, and new experiences in life. By
connecting the Museums collections with heuristic
research methods that link past, present and future,
the Haffenreffer is helping students to imagine how
museum experiences might evolve.

Students of the Lost Museums Project search the Haffenreffer

collections. Left to Right: Emily Avera, Dorin Smith, and Jess
Leyva, assisted by Deputy Director Kevin Smith

23

Education

Lectures and Public Programs

Geralyn Ducady
Curator for Programs and Education
The Haffenreffer Museum, with support from
its Friends group and campus co-sponsors,
annually offers a series of talks and
demonstrations linked to its exhibits and
anthropological topics of interest to students,
faculty, and the Providence community.

Eva Andersson Strand of the Danish National

Research Foundations Centre for Textile
Research, University of Copenhagen, Denmark,
spoke about Textiles and Textile Production in
Viking Age Scandinavia.

We started the academic year with Creating

Relics for Brown and the Search for a Useable
Past, an illustrated lecture by Robert P. Emlen,
Senior Lecturer in American Studies at Brown,
to celebrate Browns 250th Anniversary Alumni
Weekend. William Simmons also gave a
curators tour of In Deo Speramus: The Symbols
and Ceremonies of Brown University. These
programs were co-sponsored by the Brown
250th Committee.
Clark L. Erickson, Professor of Anthropology at
the University of Pennsylvania, presented the
Shepard Krech III Lecture with a talk entitled
Pre-Columbian Monumental Landscapes in the
Bolivian Amazon.

William Simmons, Professor of Anthropology,

closed the fall semester with a popular talk
entitled Paths to the Great Swamp Fight, December
19, 1675. This well-attended talk was cosponsored with the John Carter Brown Library
and the Rhode Island Historical Society.
Jaune Quick-to-see Smith started our spring
semester as the Barbara A. and Edward G. Hail
Lecturer with A Survey of Contemporary Native
American Art. This program was co-sponsored by
the Department of Visual Art at Brown.

Egyptologist and graduate student, Jen Thum,

showed how she deciphered a badly damaged
Old Kingdom relief in CultureLab during Family
Weekend. The block, along with her translation,
is currently on display in CultureLab.
Kevin McBride, Director
of Research at the
Mashantucket Pequot
Museum and Research
Center and Associate
Professor of Anthropology
at the University of
Connecticut, gave a talk,
Uncovering the 1676 Battle of
Nipsachuck, about current
research linking battlefield
archaeologys methods with
a King Philips War site in
Rhode Island.

24

Ruth Phillips, Carleton University, spoke as the

Jane Powell Dwyer Lecturer presenting Aesthetic
Primitivism Revisited: How the Love of Primitive Art
Gave Rise to Indigenous Modernism.
Tlingit glass artist Preston Singletary joined us as
the Barbara Greenwald Memorial Arts Program
speaker and presented a talk entitled (A) yx w
daa yoo tuxaatnk: This is How Im Thinking About It.
In Women and Ledger Art, Author Richard Pearce
was joined by Curator Emerita Barbara Hail and
Guest Artist Dolores Purdy Corcoran to discuss
recent Plains ledger art, as explored in Pearces
book of the same name.

Education

Reaching Out
Geralyn Ducady
Curator for Programs and Education
Our Culture CaraVan outreach program offers
eight hands-on programs using objects from
the Museums education collection to provide
enhanced understandings of the worlds cultures
for K-12 schools throughout Rhode Island and
adjacent parts of Massachusetts. The favorites
this year were Native Peoples of New England,
Culture Connect, and Dig It: Exploring Archaeology.
Our programs are designed to meet current state
and Common Core standards but are tailored
to a wide range of audiences, within and beyond
schools. These programs, run by Kathleen
Silvia reach about 3,000 participants each year!
Education collections assistant Christopher
LaChapelle has been working with Geralyn
and Kathy to reorganize and conserve the
educational collections.

We also offer on-line curriculum resources

for teachers and learners beyond our region,
with six curriculum packets, many of which
complement the outreach programs. Grace
Cleary, a doctoral student in anthropology at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, interned
with the Museum to create a new online packet
for teachers on Archaeological Ethics. Intern
Keller Anne Bumgardner is aligning this and our
other on-line packets with new Common Core
standards, Next Generation Science standards,
Rhode Island and Massachusetts History and
Social Studies standards, and WIDA Institute
standards for English Language Learners.
Through partnerships with the Joukowsky
Institute, the RISD Museum, and the Providence
Public Schools, we are in our sixth year of Think
Like an Archaeologist, a five-session program
that introduces sixth graders to archaeology and
complements their studies of ancient civilizations.
The program presents archaeology as a scientific
process from survey, through excavation, to
analysis of artifacts in the lab, and interpretation.

Encouraging critical thinking and skills required

for Common Core, students participate in four
in-class sessions and one Museum session at the
Haffenreffer and RISD Museums. Haffenreffer
education interns Molly Kerker and Rachel Himes
and I taught the classes alongside RISD Museum
staff and Joukowsky Institute proctors. Think Like
an Archaeologist has proven successful locally and
in January served as an example of archaeological
outreach at the Archaeological Institute of
Americas first educators conference, Building
a Stronger Future for Archaeological Outreach and
Education A Working Conference for Educators.
This was our third year partnering with the
Brown/Fox Point Early Childhood Education
Center, Inc. With the help of interns Molly Kerker
and Rachel Himes, I ran hands-on sessions in
classrooms where three- and four-year olds learn
about museums and object handling. Each class
has had a number of in-school sessions, and the
four-year olds also visited the Museum to learn
about museum exhibits and symbols. The fouryear olds have also started working on a new
exhibit to open later this year at the Rochambeau
Branch of the Providence Community Library.
The Museums various outreach programs would
not be as rich or as valuable for the schools
we serve, nor as integral to the Haffenreffer
Museums role in training students from Brown
University and other schools, without the help of
interns, whose thoughts about their programs and
experiences follow.

25

Education

Intern Reflections

Christopher LaChapelle is a
class of 2015 Anthropology
student at the University of
Rhode Island.

Christopher LaChapelle
Since September of 2014, I have been working as
a collections assistant intern for the Haffenreffer
Museums education department. While Ive
primarily been involved in inventorying and
organizing the education collection, I have also
had the chance to spend time in our conservation
lab addressing parasite infestations and cleaning
items that just needed a little love.
This work has provided me opportunities to get
my hands on some of the most fascinating things
theyll ever touch. But, even more amazing than
that, working on the education collection gives
me the chance to support younger students
in their learning through the Haffenreffers
outreach programs. Writing from my own
experience, this is absolutely invaluable: it was
frequent attendance at museums and museum
programming that helped me discover my
passion for anthropology and eventually led me
to museum work, which I can easily say has been
some of the most fulfilling of my life.

The landscape of K-12 education is shifting.

With the introduction of Common Core State
Standards, increased learning support standards
for English Language Learners, and increased
interest in STEM (Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Math) learning, teachers are in a
time of transition. The Haffenreffer Museums rich
collection of on-line lesson plans and curricula, in
topics as diverse as the transatlantic slave trade,
Native American cultures, and archaeological
practices and ethics, are valuable resources for
teachers and their students.
Working on this project has been a very
engaging experience, making me proud to play
a part in helping children explore the world
through anthropology and history. Ive even
recommended the Dig It! curriculum to several
former colleagues in Memphis, as a great
resource to introduce students to the themes and
concepts they explore in their science and social
studies classes. I wish I had known about it when
I was teaching!

Molly Kerker receives her MA in

Public Humanities from Brown
University this May. This is her
second year as an intern with
the Museum.

Molly Kerker
Keller Anne Bumgardner
receives her MA in Urban
Education Policy from Brown
University this May.

Keller Anne Bumgardner

This year I have been incredibly grateful for my
experience as an Educational Outreach Intern
under Geralyn Ducadys supervision. Working
with Geralyn has helped me apply my skills and
knowledge of developing curriculum guidelines to
update the Haffenreffers published lesson plans
and curricula. They will soon reflect new and more
rigorous frameworks of learning, such as the
Common Core State Standards, to help teachers
assess how and when to best use these plans.

26

Think Like An Archaeologist does more than

elicit wonder at the pastit entices students to
think about human culture today. After taking
part in hands-on archaeological activities in
the classroom, students react in awe to ancient
objects as they visit the Haffenreffer Museums
CultureLab. This Year, the In Deo Speramus exhibit
displayed signs and symbols from a contemporary
and familiar institutionBrown University, which
I used to encourage students to consider the ways
in which they also use symbolsfrom clothing
logos to school mascotsto communicate shared
meaning. My favorite element of this lesson
was when students created their own symbolladen seal (in the image of the Brown University
seal) to represent themselves. They sketched
images of Dominican flags, families holding
hands, computer game characters, soccer balls,
and paintbrushes. Many were excited to take
their drawings home to add more symbols. I
appreciate Think Like An Archaeologist for how
it links the past to the present, the seemingly
foreign to the personal. I incorporated this lesson

Education

in the preschool program we run with the Brown/

Fox Point Early Childhood Education Center, Inc.
In Deo Speramus provided a great context for
learning about symbols and three and four-yearolds that visited the museum over the last two
years were able to connect this lesson easily with
what they learned at school.

Rachel Himes is in the BrownRISD Dual Degree Class of

2015. Her concentrations
are Religious Studies and
Illustration.

Rachel Himes
As a Haffenreffer Museum education intern, I
taught four-year olds that visited from the Brown/
Fox Point Early Childhood Education Center,
Inc. The lesson I developed with the Images of
Power: Rulership in the Grasslands of Cameroon
exhibit continued their exploration of symbols.

I also taught lessons for the sixth grade Think

Like an Archaeologist program. One of the great
strengths of this program is that it encourages
students to draw their own conclusions about the
objects and information they are presented with,
rather than offering prescribed interpretations.
One of my favorite sessions is the first classroom
visit, when groups of students are given a pair
of mystery objectssmall tools and decorative
pieces that range from the identifiable to the
unrecognizable. They are asked to think like
an archaeologist and hypothesize about these
objects identities through a process of careful
analysis, comparison, and observation. One object
in particular, a bright orange crescent of hollow
plastic tubing, always elicited responses which
surprised me with their insights and diversity.
Students hypothesized that it was a garden hoe,
a drinking implement, a periscope, a dagger
sheath, a ceremonial trumpet. Participating
in this exchange forcefully reminded me how
mysterious artifacts from the ancientor
recentpast often are to us, eluding facile
identification or explanation. The open nature of
object interpretation in Think Like an Archaeologist
has caused me to consider more expansive
approaches to objects and information in my own
academic work at Brown.

This Year with the Haffenreffer Museum

Student Group
Abby Muller and Arianna Riva
HMSG President and Vice President
The Haffenreffer Museums Student Group
accomplished a great deal this year. We
expanded, reorganized, and provided
opportunities for our newest members to become
involved in our accomplishments.
We got off to a running start by organizing a trip
to the Collections Research Center to look at
the collections and develop exhibit ideas. By bus
and car we got our members out of the city and
down to Bristol for an afternoon. We toured the
buildings and even visited Metacoms seat in a
snowy drizzle. Were now using ideas from that
visit to research ideas for a new exhibit that we
hope to install next year using beautiful objects
from the museums collections.
In the fall, we organized a screening of National
Treasure on campus at the Museum. It was a
fun event that also helped us learn more about
financing and organizing logistics. We hope to
continue finding opportunities to get students into
Manning Hall and engaged with the Museum in
entertaining ways. One such project that weve
begun is to form a student docent corps to engage

visitors with the Museum. Weve had our first

training session and hope to develop a more
concrete program and tour schedule soon.
We are incredibly grateful to the Haffenreffer
Museum for supporting us in these endeavors
and to our members for the extra work needed
to make them happen. This has been an exciting
and full year. We hope that the next year will be
as successful!

27

Acknowledgements

Grants and Awards

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
National Science Foundation, Arctic Social Sciences
Rhode Island Foundation, Haffenreffer Family Fund
Rhode Island Foundation, Samuel Cate Fund
Brown University, Office of the Vice President for Research

Institutional Partners
Muse du quai Branly
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
National Museum of Scotland
Danish National Museum/Nationalmuseet
Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen
Greenland National Museum/Nunatta Katersugaasivia/Grnlands Nationalmuseum
Historical Museum of the Faroe Islands/Froya Fornminnissavn
National Museum of Iceland/jminjasafn slands
The Cultural Heritage Agency of Iceland/Minjastofnun slands
Icelandic Institute of Natural History/Nttrufristofnun slands
University of Iceland/Hskli slands
Snorrastofa Cultural/Research Centre
Icelandic Archaeological Institute/Fornleifastofnun slands
National Archives of Iceland/jskjalasafn slands
Smithsonian Institution, Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology
Crow Canyon Archaeological Center
Cochiti Pueblo

Rhode Island Partners

Rhode Island School of Design
Rhode Island School of Design Museum
Rhode Island Historical Society
Tomaquag Museum
Rochambeau Library, Providence Community Library
Providence Public Schools
Gallery Night Providence
Brown/Fox Point Early Childhood Education Center, Inc.

Brown University Partners

John Carter Brown Library
Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America
Department of Anthropology
Haffenreffer Museum Student Group
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
Native American and Indigenous Studies at Brown
Native Americans at Brown
Brown Green Events

28

Friends Board

Jeffrey Schreck, President

Elizabeth Johnson, Secretary
Susan Alcock, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology
and the Ancient World
Peter Allen, Rhode Island College
Edith Andrews, Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head
(Aquinnah)
Gina Borromeo, RISD Museum
Kristine M. Bovy, University of Rhode Island
Vicki Leigh Colvin, Provost
David Haffenreffer, Haffenreffer Family Foundation
Rudolf F. Haffenreffer
Barbara A. Hail, Curator Emerita
Sylvia Moubayed, CAV Restaurant
Daniel Smith, Chair of Anthropology
Robert W. Preucel (Ex Officio)
Kevin Smith (Ex Officio)

Administration

Robert W. Preucel, Director

Douglas Anderson, Director of the Circumpolar
Laboratory
Kevin P. Smith, Deputy Director/Chief Curator
Carol Dutton, Office Manager
Thierry Gentis, Curator/NAGPRA Coordinator
Barbara A. Hail, Curator Emerita
Nathan Arndt, Curatorial Affiliate
Rip Gerry, Exhibit Preparator/Photo Archivist
Anthony M. Belz, Museum Guard/Greeter

Programs and Education

Geralyn Ducady, Curator of Programs and

Education
Kathy Silvia, Outreach Coordinator
Christopher LaChapelle, Education Collection
Assistant
Keller Anne Bumgardner, Outreach Intern
Rachel Himes, Outreach Intern
Molly Kerker, Outreach Intern

Research

Michele Hayeur Smith, Research Associate

Christopher Wolff, Research Associate
Wanni Anderson, Research Affiliate
Edward (Ned) Dwyer, Research Affiliate

Faculty Associates

Elizabeth Hoover, Assistant Professor of American

Studies and Ethnic Studies
Steven D. Lubar, Professor of American Studies,
History of Art and Architecture, and History
William S. Simmons, Professor of Anthropology

Postdoctoral Fellow

Christy Delair, Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology

and Museum Studies

Mellon Teaching Fellows

Amy Leidtke, Faculty of Industrial Design, RISD

Graham Oliver, Professor of Classics and History
Jane South, Faculty of Sculpture, RISD
Vazira Zamindar, Assistant Professor of History

Mellon Photography Assistants

Christopher Alviar, Post Production Photography

Assistant, RISD
Sophia Sobers, Department of Digital + Media, RISD

Student Assistants

Jessica Nelson, Proctor

Arianna Riva, Collections Assistant
Nicole Amaral, Collections Intern
Chelsea Johnston, Collection Intern

Student Guards/Greeters
Morayo Akande
Brooke Gasdaska
Nora Hakizmana
Anisa Khanmohamed
Odalmy Molina
Abby Muller
Kavya Ramanan
Caroline Seyler
Daniela Serna
Destin Sisemore
Sonja Stojanovic
Seito Yamamoto

Faculty Fellows

Paja Faudree, Associate Professor of Anthropology

Catherine Lutz, Professor of Anthropology
Courtney Martin, Assistant Professor of History of
Art and Architecture
Itohan Osayimwese, Assistant Professor of History
of Art and Architecture
Patricia Rubertone, Professor of Anthropology

31

Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology

Brown University
Box 1965
Providence, RI 02912
brown.edu/Haffenreffer

Non-Profit
Organization
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PAID
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Providence, RI