Backrooms of the American Museum of Natural History
Where ethnography converges with natural history
When I think about the American Museum of Natural History, I think of the dinosaur fossils and dioramas of taxidermied animals. The thread from the museum’s name through its well-known exhibits sutures an understanding that “natural history” relates to lifeforms. The mission state is more expansive:
To discover, interpret, and disseminate — through scientific research and education — knowledge about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe.
The mission statement is almost too far reaching. It nearly describes every museum. While mission statements change, museum names are more static. The American Museum of Natural History started as an interpretation of Europe’s biology museums, The sequence of the different halls follows a focus first on animals and life forms and doesn’t take an anthropological turn until the 1980s. The ironic overlap between natural history and material culture was Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote the American Antiquities Act into law. His statue was removed from the entrance in 2021.
Finding my way to the anthropological wing felt unfamiliar. I’d been to the institution more than a dozen times in the last twelve years and never stumbled upon them.
The displays are dated. I’d wager a guess that they have never been updated since their initial installment, 40 years ago. And there’s a lot to be gleaned from the aesthetics of the mode of display. Many are reminiscent of jewelry display cases, assortments of items with only the slightest relationship. Country of origin. Material. Epoch. Pendants, tools and ceramic fragments lie in quiet consternation from having been dropped, lost for eons, covered and revealed by weathering, picked up and carried across the globe to collect dust under a fluorescent bulb.
Even the gold artifacts from Colombia, Peru and Costa Rica seem lifeless, valueless and, noting that no security guards dutied these rooms, I wondered if the gold were even real or just copper replicas, and whether anyone would care if I gently lifted the glass and left with the artifacts. Notably, the Latin American rooms were visited primarily by hispanohablantes; the Asian Peoples rooms, occupied by Asian peoples.
My interest in searching out these forlorn artifacts emerged from my imminent trip to Belize and to visit the Maya ruins. I was pleasantly surprised to find works that were taken–under whatever auspices–by the godfather of Mayanists, John Lloyd Stevens. To say that Stevens’ Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan inspired generations of archeologies would be a grave understatement. The book’s popularity serialized into incidents of travel to Egypt, Petra and the Middle East. The books were the second most widely-read in the English language, after the Bible. John L. Stevens has invented travel writing for the general public. The prose is lucid and aurate. The illustrations by Frederick Catherwood give you everything you wanted but didn’t find in the crude doodlings of Alexander von Humboldt’s notebook. I was stunned to see the heads that Stevens took from the Maya temples on the wall.
Stevens describes coming upon Tikal, one of the largest urban centers of the Maya lowlands as follows:
A short distance in the rear of the hacienda were the ruins of another city, desolate and overgrown, having no name except that of the hacienda on which they stand. At this time a great part of the city was completely hidden by the thick foliage of trees. Nearby, however, several mounds were in full sight, dilapidated, and having fragments of walls on the top. We ascended the highest, which commanded a magnificent view of the great wooded plan, and at a distance the towers of the church of Ticul rising darkly above. [2]
The presence of some of these artifacts in the American Museum of Natural History is counterintuitive, not only because of the institution’s exceptional caliber and prioritization of natural history, but that just across the park is the Metropolitan Museum, one of the world’s foremost collections of antiquities, which are shown as precious mementos of world history.
Notes[1] “Central America is a cultural misnomer. Central America is, tectonically speaking, either part of the North America plate, stretching down to Mexico, or the Caribbean plate, which supports Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama.The North American-Caribbean Plate boundary in Mexico-Guatemala-Honduras, Ratschbacher, Lothar, Franz Leander, Myo Min, et al. Geological Society London Special Publications, December 2009. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233736111_The_North_American-Caribbean_Plate_boundary_in_ Mexico-Guatemala-Honduras[2] Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, John Lloyd Stevens, Harper & Brothers 1843. P 16
