Urbane Exploration 1 by Augustus deCorbeau
December 12th, 2008 2:19 AM / Location: 35.084648,-106.6251
The interior is comfortably spacious, with an open lounge area in the atrium, surrounded by classrooms and faculty offices.
The building was donated by Dr. Frank C. Hibben (1910-2002), archaeologist, adventurer, big game hunter, and philanthropist.
It contains a secret network of tunnels and rooms.
Deep below ground.
This carefully climate-controlled labyrinth is where the university stores its collection of archaeological artifacts.
With enough persistence and contacts, I was able to get in touch with one of the curators, who agreed to take a couple of us from the field school in to see the collection.
(In order to get access to this restricted area, I had to agree not to sell or publish any of the photos I took inside. They are here for your entertainment -- please don't spread them outside sf0. Thanks.)
This is where many of the artifacts from Chaco Canyon are preserved.
Some show signs of ancient use.
Many have bold black-on-white painted designs characteristic of the Chaco culture.
Not a square foot of space is wasted. In order to get back to see a preserved mural, we had to scoot along the wall behind a rack of rugs.
It was a tight squeeze. In fact, the mural had been forgotten about for many years, since no one ever went back that far!
There are also some amazingly detailed South American textiles.
Including a khipu!
These knotted strings were the written language of the Inca empire. Only 600 or so survived the Spanish conquest.
This is all just a tiny sample of the tiny sample we got to see -- it's hard to convey the scale of what's down there! It was a pretty amazing way to finish up my stay in New Mexico.
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chac08 comment(s)
I'm very jealous. Having grown up in New Mexico I've always wanted to get into the dark underbelly of the museums to see the things that the universities had from my tribes past, but I never had the connections.
Very very jealous. Grrmph.
Hmm. I wonder, there must be at least a few museum curators out there that would be willing to do a personal behind-the-scenes tour for a random person who was really interested.
I'm sure they would! I don't think they get many visitors in the bowels of the storage museum, so my guide was very enthusiastic about showing us around. "Oh! And you'll want to see this neat thing over here... *runs around the corner and starts rummaging through drawers*"
Several times he insisted that if we ever wanted to do an independent research project, we could have access to the original source material. I imagine that with a polite, convincing story and a fair bit of persistence, most places would let you take a peek at their collections. I've also found that museum curators like to give back-room tours to reporters/photographers from college newspapers. The trick is finding the one person who is: A. friendly, B. high enough up in the system to authorize it, and C. actually there. Generally, you can get 2 of the 3...
A lot of the stuff in storage probably never even gets looked at, once it's been cataloged and stabilized. One entire room, for instance, was filled with those cranking library shelves -- the ones where you only have one walkway, and have to push the shelves around to open the one you want. Each shelf was filled with boxes of broken pottery sherds. There could have been tens or hundreds of thousands of pottery bits there, all sealed away -- and they've probably been there since they were brought in. I mean, it's not like you can really do an exhibit of piles little ceramic fragments...
How about an archaeological SFZero roadtrip, guys? Hey, or an Underground Exploration Roadtrip, including both archeology and forensics! And something else that I am not even remembering some of you do/have access to!
Awesome people meet, we get to read a great completion, drive is hopefully spread around, everyone is happy ... :)
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Coolio. Secret underbellies hide the neatest stuff. And museums are also Mad Interesting.
so cool! you brought me where I was never going to be! ...and also you have my same name :)