ATADA News, Summer, 2006
From the President
Is it time to broaden ATADA's objectives?
"ATADA was formed to represent professional dealers of antique tribal art. Our objectives are to promote professional conduct among dealers and to educate the public in the valuable role of tribal art in the wealth of human experience. We will develop informed opinions and practices by publications, educational grants and legal activism. Those actions will be supported by newsletters, seminars, and the formation of action committees. It is our intent to monitor and publicize legislative efforts and government regulations concerning trade in tribal art, and to assess public reaction. To attain our objectives, we will actively seek suggestions from other organizations and individuals with similar interests."
These are the objectives of our organization as stated in our By- Laws. Recent events such as difficulties in negotiating desired changes (voted on by the membership) in show formats with some promoters, conflicts of interest with other major players, along with increased competition within our business from sources - other than dealers - have suggested to me that perhaps it is time to consider broadening these objectives. I have been a member of ATADA since its inception and have often heard the question, "Just what does ATADA do for me". Hopefully, because of our informative newsletter, most of us have a better idea of how to answer that question. Unfortunately, the quandary does seem to continue. Perhaps it is a question of relevancy. As a good union represents the wishes of its membership to management, perhaps our organization should consider empowering the Board to represent the approved wishes (voted on by the membership) of its members that directly impact their businesses. Should we begin to become more business- and PR-oriented instead of just remaining in the necessary but rarified air of our initial objectives?
This is a subject that, in my opinion, needs exploration and discussion. I hope we have a very full General Meeting in Santa Fe this summer. Please attend and come armed and ready to think outside the box. We can continue with business as usual if that is what our members want, or we can progress and grow with our changing market. This may require putting more teeth into our stated positions. We need to decide if we want to meet that challenge.
Kennewick Man Update
May 9, 2006
SON OF KENNEWICK MAN?
A faceless skull, nicknamed Stickman, sits in a cardboard box at Central Washington University in Ellensburg. It's nearly as old as Kennewick Man but hasn't drawn nearly the controversy. This and other ancient remains are beginning to tell stories about early North Americans.
For more on this story, go to http://www.kennewick-man.com.
Email from Merrill to the Membership:
As you know by now, the Whitehawk management has decided not to give the dealers a two hour window in which to unload and begin set up before the early entry buyers enter the show. This was surprising and disappointing because I was under the impression from my conversation with Marcia Berridge that the two hour window would be in place. You may remember that the membership, most of who were exhibitors, voted last August to request an end to early entry buying. I relayed this to Marcia and was informed that although she would not give up early entry all together, she would give us a two hour window. This seemed a fair first step for the time being.
I am sure that some are in favor of keeping early entry in place, and your voice has a right to be heard. However, we did take a vote of "preference" at the 2005 meeting. The reasoning behind the vote was multi-layered. It was felt that by limiting or canceling early entry buying, we would be elevating the stature of the show. With the exception of Kim Martindale's shows (for the present), no other major show in the country allows early buyers in during set up. It was also felt that it would give the dealers the few hours that we do have to set up a professional display and be ready to meet the buying public in a professional manner later that evening at the opening. Finally, the reasoning is that as dealers, we have purchased our space in the show and ultimately make the show happen. We should be afforded the opportunity to shop from one another. These were the topics discussed and the vote was as stated above.
Please take this opportunity to email or call Marcia Berridge (mberridge@sisna.com) and let her know your opinion. Ultimately, it is always her decision, but I do believe that any promoter must have an interest in the opinions of her clientele, which is basically us.
Thank you for your time and attention to this important matter.
Merrill Domas
Clarification/Reply from K R Martindale:
Kim's Marin Show does have an early buy-in but he gives the dealers 3 hours set up time, prior to allowing the early entrants in. Thanks.
Victoria Roberts
K R Martindale Gallery & Show Management
Book Review by Ramona Morris
"The Desert Southwest: Four Thousand years of Life and Art"
Allan Hayes and Carol Hayes
Photography by John Blom
Ten Speed Press, Berkeley and Toronto, 2006
$35
Those among us who are familiar with the book "Southwestern Pottery; Anasazi to Zuni" by Allan Hayes and John Blom are in for another treat. Joined by his wife, Carol Hayes, as co-author, Hayes and photographer Blom have delivered another entertaining and informative book. Undaunted by the scope of their subject, they have produced a comprehensive survey of the "other Southwest" - the land below the Mogollon Rim - an area of lesser known but historically significant cultures.
They begin with a great leap backward. In the last ten years., the perceived origins of Southwest civilization - agriculture, ceramics and organized architecture - were pushed back over 2000 years to circa 2000BCE with the discovery of the Tucson farmers. Succeeding cultures such as the Hohokam and the Mogollon are convincingly connected to living cultures through language and artifacts, a step many anthropologists hesitate to take.
Other chapters deal with the arrival of the Spanish and their missions, the Anglos with their railroads, mining and settlement, and adaptations of the Indian cultures, including revivals of art traditions and the advent of casinos, all enlivened by beautiful photographs.
If all education were so entertaining and easy to digest, there would be a much more informed public out there.
Ramona Morris
Media File
Excerpts from recent newspaper, magazine and Internet articles of interest to the Membership. All opinions are those of the writers of the articles and of the people quoted, not of ATADA. Members are encouraged to submit press clippings or email links for publication in the next Newsletter.
"Sale of aboriginal art a travesty, native group says," was the headline for a May 2 story by Randy Boswell of the CanWest News Service that appeared in newspapers across Canada.
The story: "An American native group is condemning the sale of rare 19th-century aboriginal artifacts collected by an eccentric Scottish earl known as the 'first tourist' to visit the Rocky Mountains.
"The 147-year-old collection of James Carnegie, the ninth Earl of Southesk, includes a decorated sheep hide dress now valued at more than $200,000 US but bought in 1859 from a Blood Indian woman in Saskatchewan for a bottle of rum.
"Another highlight is a beaded buckskin shirt, probably from a Blackfoot warrior who hunted buffalo on the Canadian Prairies, expected to sell for more than $500,000 US.
"Sotheby's, which has organized the May 8 sale in New York, describes the items gathered by Carnegie as 'the most historically significant group of American Indian art ever to be offered at auction.'
"But the Minnesota-based American Indian Movement compares the auction to selling 'gold teeth from Auschwitz' and vowed to force Sotheby's and Carnegie's descendants in Scotland including the current Earl of Southesk, David Carnegie, to return the relics to tribes in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana.
" 'To say we're outraged would be minimizing the impact this has had on us,' AIM spokesman Vernon Bellecourt told CanWest News Service on Monday. He said the organization plans to invoke U.S. laws mandating the repatriation of sacred objects and to work with the Assembly of First Nations and other Canadian groups to block the Sotheby's sale.
"Before Canada and the U.S. established fixed boundary lines in the mid-19th century, tribes moved with bison herds throughout the mid-west plains and occupied territory on both sides of the present international boundary.
"Bellecourt added that tribes across the continent suffered centuries of 'looting by the scientific and archeological and anthropological communities' as soldiers and settlers gradually forced indigenous people from their traditional hunting grounds.
"He specifically targeted the planned sale of the Blood Indian dress, which Carnegie described in detail in the journal he kept during his Canadian travels.
" 'Mr. Chastellain gave me a beautiful specimen of a Blood Indian woman's dress, made from prepared skins of the mountain sheep, and richly embroidered with blue and white beads,' Carnegie wrote in November 1859 while staying at Fort Pitt, Sask., just north of present-day Lloydminster and east of the Alberta border.
" 'Such dresses are now seldom to be met with. An Indian, trading here one day, stripped his wife of this tunic-formed outer garment, and sold it on the spot for rum.'
"His account of how he obtained the dress, reproduced in Sotheby's sale catalogue, 'fortifies every ignorant stereotype' of aboriginal North Americans, said Bellecourt.
" 'That's totally outrageous. It would be like somebody who had a collection of artifacts clothing, eyeglasses, gold teeth, and diamond rings from victims of the Holocaust.'
"Sotheby's spokesman Matthew Weigman said 'we take these issues very seriously' but insisted the artifacts to be sold were all legally obtained by the Earl of Southesk and that Bellecourt was making 'inappropriate comparisons.'
" 'They were acquired by someone who was a tourist in the 19th century,' Weigman said. 'They were acquired by trade, and not acquired by force in any way.'
"The objects were discovered stored and in almost perfect condition at Kinnaird Castle in Scotland. Among the Carnegie treasures is an Assiniboine knife and beaded moose hide sheath, acquired at Fort Edmonton in October 1859 and now estimated at $40,000 US. The 39 items from the Scottish collection are to be sold with about 200 other First Nations artifacts from North America, including a northwest coast shaman's rattle valued at up to $175,000 US. In all, Sotheby's expects to get as much as $3.9 million from its landmark auction of Indian art.
"The Earl of Southesk had become a widower and was seeking an outdoor adventure to restore his health when he set off on his Canadian journey in 1859. He mingled with some of the leading frontiersmen of the day including the famed Great Plains artist Paul Kane and Arctic explorer John Rae, and Carnegie's pioneering trek to the Rockies is still remembered in an Alberta river, mountain peak and mountain pass that bear his name."
Diary extract:
''The Blackfeet far surpass the Crees in cleanliness, and fineness of apparel. Mr. Chastellain gave me a beautiful specimen of a Blood Indian woman's dress, made from prepared skins of the mountain-sheep, and richly embroidered with blue and white beads. Such dresses are now seldom to be met with. An Indian, trading here one day, stripped his wife of this tunic-formed outer garment, and sold it on the spot for rum.''
From Saskatchewan and the Rocky Mountains, a diary of the 1859-60 travels in Canada of James Carnegie, 9th Earl of Sussex, published 1875.
The San Francisco Chronicle's story, "How de Young is handling New Guinea art question," was written by Jesse Hamlin and was published on May 4, 2006.
"It's hard to resist a story about looted art," Hamlin's story began, "whether it involves Italian tomb robbers, Greek marbles in the British Museum or Nazis who love Leonardo. Former Getty Museum antiquities curator Marion True is on trial in Rome for allegedly conspiring to buy stolen artifacts. In February, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art finally agreed to return to Italy a rare 2,500-year-old Greek vase and other pieces the Italian government insists were looted from archeological sites and sold to the Met by a dealer who's also on trial.
"Then there's the recent news that a handful of sculptures at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum may be the 'national cultural property' of Papua New Guinea, and if so, probably were exported illegally. A story last month in the British science magazine Nature, based on information provided by an Australian ethnologist who worked at the national museum of Papua New Guinea in Port Morseby in the 1980s, strongly suggests that nine pieces in the great Jolika Collection of New Guinea art assembled by John and Marcia Friede - 400 of which are on view at the de Young - are on a list of objects deemed the national cultural property of Papua New Guinea and, by law, should not have left the Pacific island nation.
"Whether or not that turns out to be true - an official from the Port Morseby museum who was here last month thinks three of the pieces are on the list - San Francisco museum officials say this issue shouldn't be compared to the controversial Met and Getty situations. Nobody from the Papua New Guinea government has claimed that the works in the 3,000-piece Friede collection - a promised gift to the de Young - were stolen or has asked for their return. Instead, officials are working with the museum and the collector to sort it all out and find a farsighted solution to a very complex cultural issue.
" 'Even if those few pieces in the Jolika Collection are ultimately proven to have been NCP (national cultural property) objects, the question that may be asked is what to do with those few works of art,' said Evan Paki, the Papua New Guinea ambassador to the United States, in a statement. The collection, wrote Paki, who attended the opening of the de Young last fall when the display went up, 'represents an ideal act of preservation of rare PNG masterpieces and our rich art history. If John and Marcia Friede did not use their own financial resources to acquire these works from private collectors in Europe and Australia, the objects would only remain in private hands and would almost never see the light of day.'
"John Friede, the ambassador said, 'may well have innocently acquired those few NCP objects,' and if so, 'there was, and is, in our view, no illegal conduct or behavior on his part.' If the Friedes and the Fine Arts Museums decide voluntarily to return some of the pieces, Paki went on, it wouldn't be wise do so until the Port Morseby museum, which 'is in a rebuilding and expansion mode,' can properly care for and protect them.
" 'We need to look at this issue from all different angles,' Paki said by phone from Washington. He mentioned the possibility of a mutual loan agreement between the two museums, in keeping with the cooperative spirit that has characterized the Friedes' and the museum's dealings with his country, and the fellowship program for New Guinea artists and curators that the Friedes have established here.
"Getting all the facts about the works in question is part of 'an ongoing process to investigate the origins and provenance of all the objects,' said Fine Arts Museums director John Buchanan. The whole point, he added, is to get the works out there and 'expose them to the general public and to scholars and find out more about them.'
"A few weeks ago, Sebastine Haraha, senior technical officer in the department of anthropology at the National Museum and Art Gallery in Port Morseby, came to the United States at the Friedes' expense and visited the de Young and the Friedes' home in Rye, N.Y. Haraha examined the works in question (six here, three at the Friedes') and saw the full collection - spiritual objects whose fantastical forms carry a potent life force - that the Friedes have spent 40 years assembling. Christina Hellmich, the collection's curator, had contacted Haraha earlier this year when the issue first arose.
"Haraha brought to San Francisco what Hellmich describes as 'partial documentation' - copies of government files, which aren't on a database, and some undated photographs - pertaining to four of the nine works that Australian anthropologist Barry Craig says are listed as national cultural property. Reached by phone in Adelaide, Australia, where he works at the Museum of South Australia, Craig said he saw several of the pieces out in the field in the early '80s while working in Papua New Guinea. He recognized them in the lavish two-volume book on the Friede collection that the Fine Arts Museums published last year. Last week, the book won first prize in the American Association of Museums' publication design competition.
"One of the four objects Haraha had files on is a spooky carved wooden mask with a flying fox and bird heads, among other mythical imagery, from a site near Masandamai village, dated A.D. 650-780. Craig said he went out looking for the mask and another piece in the early '80s, when part of his job was to monitor the works listed as national cultural property. He learned that they'd been sold several years earlier, he said, and the sale price and buyer's name were noted in the files. Last year, he recognized the mask in a story in the Oceanic Art Newsletter about a lecture John Friede had given in Sydney and wrote a follow-up piece in the same journal saying the mask had been taken out of Papua New Guinea without the required permit.
"In San Francisco, Haraha looked at the mask and the other objects at issue, and 'I confirmed that three of those pieces are listed as national cultural property,' said Haraha, on the phone from Port Morseby. 'I'm currently working on trying to go through the files concerning the others in question,' added Haraha, who will give the Fine Arts Museums whatever additional documentation he finds. When he finishes his research, he will 'write a report on the whole issue and give it to my bosses.' They will decide what, if any, action the Papua New Guinea government will take. The law says objects exported illegally should be returned, but that's not his call to make.
"The Fine Arts Museums, which have voluntarily repatriated artworks to various countries in the past, have a reputation for dealing with tricky cross-cultural issues in a careful and open manner. In the late '70s and '80s, they negotiated a landmark agreement with the Mexican government over the disposition of prized mural fragments from the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan.
"The murals had been bequeathed to the museum by San Francisco architect Harald Wagner. Stunned by the gift and concerned about the provenance of these priceless artifacts - which had been brought into this country legally but probably had been looted from the ruins of Teotihuacan - museum officials immediately contacted Mexican officials. A U.S. federal judge ruled that the Mexican government had no legal claim to the murals, but the museum joined forces with Mexican colleagues to create a mural restoration and exhibition program, and San Francisco voluntarily returned 70 percent of the murals to Mexico. The great Olmec head now on long-term loan to the de Young is one of the fruits of that relationship.
"The Fine Arts Museums didn't have to return the murals, 'but we decided it was the collegial, ethical thing to do,' says curator Kathy Berrin, who was involved in those negotiations and now heads the museum's department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. She has worked with the Friedes for many years and is passionate about showing these objects and 'pushing the field along.' She's upset by suggestions in the press that 'we have skipped over due diligence, or have something to hide, when we've put so much energy into trying to do this right, from the get-go.'
"The complicated issues of cultural patrimony now being debated in the museum world will be around for decades, Berrin said, 'and I'm sure we're not going to get crystal-clear answers. It's always a matter of weighing, trying to get the right balance.' "
This AP story, "Did Secret Society Swipe Geronimo's Skull? New Clue Turns Up in Yale Legend," by Stephen Singer appeared on AOL News on May 9, 2006. A similar story appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal on May 8.
Datelined Hartford, CT, the story began, "A Yale University historian has uncovered a 1918 letter that seems to lend validity to the lore that Yale University's ultra-secret Skull and Bones society swiped the skull of American Indian leader Geronimo.
" 'The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club ... is now safe inside the (Tomb) together with his well worn femurs, bit & saddle horn,' the 1918 letter by Winter Mead reads.
"The letter, written by one member of Skull and Bones to another, purports that the skull and some of the Indian leader's remains were spirited from his burial plot in Fort Sill, Okla., to a stone tomb in New Haven that serves as the club's headquarters.
"According to Skull and Bones legend, members - including President Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush - dug up Geronimo's grave when a group of Army volunteers from Yale were stationed at the fort during World War I. Geronimo died in 1909.
"But Mead was not at Fort Sill and researcher Marc Wortman, who found the letter last fall, said Monday he is skeptical the bones are actually those of the famed Indian fighter.
" 'What I think we could probably say is they removed some skull and bones and other materials from a grave at Fort Sill,' he said. 'Historically, it may be impossible to prove it's Geronimo's. They believe it's from Geronimo.'
"Harlyn Geronimo, the great grandson of Geronimo, said he has been looking for a lawyer to sue the U.S. Army, which runs Fort Sill. Discovery of the letter could help, he said. 'It's keeping it alive and now it makes me really want to confront the issue with my attorneys,' said Geronimo, of Mescalero, N.M. 'If we get the remains back... and find that, for instance, that bones are missing, you know who to blame.'
"A portion of the letter and an accompanying story were posted Monday on the Yale Alumni Magazine's Web site. Only 15 Yale seniors are asked to join Skull and Bones each year. Alumni include Sen. John Kerry, President William Howard Taft, numerous members of Congress, media leaders, Wall Street financiers, the scions of wealthy families and agents in the CIA. Members swear an oath of secrecy about the group and its strange rituals, which are said to include an initiation rite in which would-be members kiss a skull."
A story from The Wall Street Journal called "The Rich Dig Deep: Archaeology's New Players," was written by G. Bruce Knecht and published on May 13. The subhead: "As traditional funds for excavations fall short, wealthy benefactors are bolstering the hunt for antiquities."
Datelined Northern Guatemala, the story began, "Aboard a small helicopter crossing a seemingly endless rainforest, Leon Reinhart is describing our destination, the San Bartolo archaeological site. 'We are uncovering the oldest-known Maya murals and the oldest writing anyone has ever found in the Americas,' he says.
"Mr. Reinhart isn't an archaeologist. He isn't an academic. He is a retired banker. In providing funding for the excavation at San Bartolo, Mr. Reinhart is one of a growing number of bankers, entrepreneurs and philanthropists who are playing a crucial role in archaeology. They are providing millions of dollars to study and preserve the relics of ancient civilizations from Latin America to Italy and Turkey, giving life to projects that would otherwise die.
"It's a throwback in some ways to the days when excavations were largely the preserve of European aristocrats. After World War II, many governments got tougher about projects on their soil, and excavations became the province of academics backed by universities and government funds. Now those funds are getting tight: Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, for example, decreased to $2.2 million in 2005 from $2.6 million in 1995. Meanwhile, schools are churning out more archaeologists and the number of estimated digs world-wide has tripled in two decades. Private backers are helping fill that vacuum.
"Of the thousands major digs around the world, more than half of the funding for American-led excavations now comes from private individuals and their foundations, says Jim Wiseman, a former president of the Archaeological Institute of America.
"In the past, some of these donors have also collected antiquities, fueling concerns about looting. Mr. Reinhart and many of the new private backers do not collect. In many cases, they say their interest extends beyond archaeology to improving living conditions in the countries where they're digging. Even as they fund excavations, they're also paying to build schools and support agricultural projects.
"Archaeology has changed significantly over the past century. First amateurs and treasure-hunting professionals gave way to museum- and university-backed digs. In the 1960s and 70s, archaeology began to adopt more scientific methods, with strong influences from anthropology. Large-scale digs are now done under the auspices of national governments, which increasingly seek to keep their heritage within their borders.
"Among the other members of the new generation of benefactors is Charles Williams II, himself an archaeologist. He directed the enormous excavation project in Corinth and has supported projects in Sicily and at Gordia in Turkey, where Alexander cut the Gordian knot. Through his foundation, David Packard, son of the Hewlett-Packard founder, financed the work at Zeugma in southwest Turkey that rescued a large number of mosaics just before they were submerged by a new dam. And a foundation created by Artemis Joukowsky, the former chancellor of Brown University, is funding conservation work at the Great Temple of Petra in Jordan.
"Mr. Reinhart learned about San Bartolo thanks to the efforts of an investment banker, Lewis S. Ranieri, who pioneered the mortgage-securities market at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s and now is chairman of CA, the information-technology concern formerly known as Computer Associates. Mr. Ranieri created the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, or Famsi, devoted to archaeology.
"On Famsi's Web site, Mr. Reinhart read an article about San Bartolo written by Bill Saturno, the young archaeologist who literally stumbled across the ruin in 2001. Entering a tunnel cut by looters, he immediately understood that the paintings were much older than previously discovered Mayan murals with such complicated iconography.
"Fascinated by Mr. Saturno's article, Mr. Reinhart sent him an email. Because the project had received grants from Famsi and the National Geographic Society, Mr. Reinhart assumed it was fully funded; he soon learned that wasn't the case. Mr. Saturno was borrowing on his personal credit card to keep the work going. Mr. Reinhart agreed to cover most of the needed funds -- a sum that has now crossed the $1 million mark. (Among this year's expenses: $65,000 for stabilizing the murals and $18,700 in food.)
"Mr. Reinhart's fascination with archaeology developed over a 34-year career with Citibank that included postings in Iran, Dubai, Bahrain, Ecuador, Panama and Mexico. Inspired by glimpses of ancient civilizations, he and his wife used much of their free time to visit archaeological sites. By the time they moved to Mexico, they were hiring archaeologists to give seminars for other expats and leading museum tours. After his retirement, he set up a foundation, which is his vehicle for funding work at San Bartolo.
"Mr. Reinhart and his foundation are also hiring teachers in a village near San Bartolo, financing the construction of schools and installing reinforced-concrete stoves that consume only a fifth of the firewood used by traditional open fires. The stoves, which cost $1,000 apiece, reduce smoke-caused disease and slow the destruction of forests.
"Once the helicopter lands near San Bartolo, Mr. Reinhart crouched through a small tunnel that burrows into a pyramid-shaped mound covered with dirt, vines and trees. It didn't take long to reach the mural room, a narrow, 30-foot-long chamber lined with vividly illustrated panels with elaborately costumed human figures, alligators and two-headed snakes. 'This is the very beginning - the story of creation,' he said. 'It was painted before the birth of Christ.'
"A couple of days after the visit to San Bartolo, Mr. Reinhart's helicopter touched down in a village where the foundation has been active. On the dirt floor of the house where Lorenzo Ixcoy and Maria Chamay live, a fire burns all day. There is no flue, so the space is always thick with smoke, and Mr. Ixcoy and Ms. Chamay cough almost constantly.
"The air in the house next door is clear, thanks to a stove that was installed a year earlier. Plus, Juana Lopez, a mother of four, said through a translator, her husband no longer has to climb into the hills every day to collect firewood, so he can spend more time taking care of his crops.
"Mr. Reinhart sees a tie-in between his work with the ancient and the living Maya. 'Excavating and restoring Mayan archaeological sites like San Bartolo can be used to show the living Maya what a rich and regal heritage they came from, and they can be proud of who they are,' says Mr. Reinhart. 'And since the Maya who built the ancient civilizations are still here, people and organizations who have the financial capacity can see that there is a great opportunity to bring these people out of their poverty.'
"At a village school, his theory was realized. When the school's director said a $20,000 addition would enable an additional 60 students to go to school, two men traveling with Mr. Reinhart took up the challenge. Mark Victor Hansen, a co-author of the best-selling 'Chicken Soup for the Soul,' and Robert Allen, author of 'Nothing Down,' said they would each contribute $5,000 and do their best to line up the rest of the required funds."
"On Ancient Walls, a New Maya Epoch," John Noble Wilford's May 16 story in The New York Times on the same murals, focuses on their historic and scientific importance, not the financing of the project.
The story: "On the sacred walls and inside the dark passageways of ancient ruins in Guatemala, archaeologists are making discoveries that open expanded vistas of the vibrant Maya civilization in its formative period, a time reaching back more than 1,000 years before its celebrated Classic epoch.
"The intriguing finds, including art masterpieces and the earliest known Maya writing, are overturning old ideas of the Preclassic period. It was not a kind of dark age, as once thought, of a culture that emerged and bloomed in Classic times, at places like the spectacular royal ruin at Palenque beginning about A.D. 250 and extending to its mysterious collapse around 900.
"At the derelict ceremonial center of pyramids and wide plazas, a site in remote northeastern Guatemala known as San Bartolo, archaeologists have uncovered the unexpected remains of murals in vivid colors depicting the Maya mythology of creation and kingship.
"The murals date to 100 B.C., and nearby, a column of hieroglyphs, a century or two older, attests to an already well-developed writing system.
"News of the discoveries, announced in the last six months by an American-Guatemalan team led by William A. Saturno of the University of New Hampshire, is reverberating through the small community of Mayanists. They see these and other recent finds as strong evidence for the early origin and remarkable continuity of the culture's concepts of cosmology and possibly governance over more than a Preclassic millennium.
"The Classic splendor was no sudden, unanticipated efflor- escence.
"Coming away from a visit to San Bartolo, Michael D. Coe, a retired Yale Mayanist who was not involved in the work, called the murals 'one of the greatest Maya discoveries of all time.'
"Stephen Houston, of Brown, said, 'We are entering a golden age of Preclassic study,' adding that the discipline of Maya research 'will be marked by a time before the discovery of these paintings in the jungle of Guatemala, and a time thereafter.' Other experts have already focused new research on Preclassic ruins, some dating at least to 900 B.C., and are reinterpreting finds in light of the San Bartolo evidence.
" 'San Bartolo has created excitement and momentum for investigations deeper into the Preclassic period,' said Julia Guernsey, a specialist in art history and Maya iconography at the University of Texas. 'More attention is being paid to the antecedents of the Classic Maya.'
"In her book 'Ritual and Power in Stone,' to be published in December, Dr. Guernsey reviews many examples of stucco facades, painted murals and carved monuments that illustrate Preclassic development of the imagery of enduring Maya concepts of creation, the spirit world and the metaphorical expression of power and authority of rulers.
"New attention, Dr. Guernsey said, is centered on the common monumental motif in the Classic period that has now been increasingly recognized as early as the middle Preclassic era, 900 to 300 B.C. It is known as the quatrefoil. The design is something like a four-leaf clover and is found in the arrangement of stones or carved in stone or crated with packed earth and painted clay at a ceremonial site, as at La Blanca on the Pacific coastal plain in Guatemala. La Blanca, occupied from 900 B.C. to 600 B.C., is being excavated by Michael W. Love of California State University-Northridge, with Dr. Guernsey as the project iconographer.
"Other Preclassic examples are being examined at Izapa, across the Mexican border from La Blanca, where quatrefoils and monuments date to between 300 B.C. and 50 B.C. An Izapa throne is framed in a quatrefoil. Similar imagery has been uncovered in Mexico at Chalcatzingo, dating from as early as 700 B.C. Dr. Guernsey said this was 'the clearest expression of the links between quatrefoils, animal mouths, caves and portals.'
"Archaeologists think the quatrefoil, often in association with water channels and basins, may have been part of the iconography in ceremonies to the rain god and fertility. In other cases, it is formed around a cave entrance, perhaps symbolic of creation and the supernatural.
"Dr. Guernsey surmised that the previously underappreciated quatrefoil might have been a prop for public performances in which the ruler dances and passes through the open center in a ritual demonstrating his power to intercede with the gods, hence his authority as leader. Even then, rulers were actors, and this was the Maya version of a staged photo opportunity.
"Today, the quatrefoil can be seen as a symbolic portal through which archaeologists are passing to explore mysteries of Maya culture far back in Preclassic time.
"One new puzzle yet to be solved is the Preclassic Maya script found at San Bartolo. The column of 10 glyphs, painted in black on white plaster, is definitely Maya writing from 300 B.C. to 200 B.C., experts say, but so far it is unreadable.
"Dr. Saturno, the discoverer, and colleagues reported that the writing sample 'implies that a developed Maya writing system was in use centuries earlier than previously thought, approximating a time when we see the earliest scripts elsewhere in Mesoamerica.'
"Dr. Houston, an expert in Maya glyphs at Brown, agrees, saying the sophistication of the scribe's technique and the inventory of signs suggest that 'this was not a system invented the day before.' How long before, a few generations or centuries, he added, is not known in the absence of further evidence, but its origins could be contemporaneous with Zapotec writing in Oaxaca, Mexico, or some symbolic systems of the Olmec along the Gulf Coast.
"The origin of writing in Mesoamerica, the area of southern Mexico and parts of Central America, is a contentious issue. Zapotec scholars say writing started first in Oaxaca as early as 600 B.C. and spread into Maya territory to the south. But if it did, the San Bartolo glyphs show the time gap is closing.
"At the University of Texas, David Stuart, a professor of Mesoamerican art and writing, ran his finger down a drawing of the San Bartolo text. Such Maya glyphs are stylized lines and dots with animate figures, some human and others birds, snake heads and jaguars. It is writing without an alphabet, and had defied decipherment until the last decades of the 20th century.
" 'The text is 1,000 years before the late Classic writing, which we are good at reading - up to 95 percent of it,' Dr. Stuart said. 'Any script is going to go through significant changes over that time. But these glyphs are very unusual, very different from later writing.'
"The single glyph he thought he could read was the seventh one down the column. It includes the sign for the word lord or noble. 'But if it referred to a true king,' Dr. Stuart said, 'the sign would have a symbol with it to say "divine lord." '
"A hand appears to be in the top glyph. Dr. Houston speculated that it looked like a human hand clutching a brush, perhaps referring to the scribe. Dr. Stuart pointed to what could be a human profile in the 9th glyph, a bird perched on a nest in the 8th one and a bird with hooked beak in the 10th. But neither expert could say what the message was. This inability to read the text, Dr. Houston said, may be because the Maya system underwent a major change at the time the Preclassic culture collapsed, around A.D. 100 to 200, with widespread evidence of destroyed or abandoned cities.
"Even though the disruption was sharp, scholars say, the similarities between the few samples of Preclassic writing and the Classic style testify to a measure of continuity. But it was not as obvious, say, as the transitions from Chaucerian English to Shakespeare down to that used on blogs.
"As in any code breaking, Dr. Stuart said, success usually depends on having many text samples to work with. Even computers would not speed up decipherment. 'Computers would be overwhelmed by the virtual variations,' he said. 'There's a human element to it. A computer code breaker would be fabled, and the human mind is the only thing that can access this, because the glyphs were created by humans.'
"Archaeologists expressed hope that more of the text or similar ones would eventually be found and that new efforts would be made to search for writing at larger Preclassic sites, like the ruins around El Mirador.
"The 100 B.C. murals at San Bartolo, one 30 feet long, were found in a pyramid chamber below 50 feet of rubble. Dr. Saturno found the first painting when he ducked into a trench for shade and saw the face of a maize god on the north wall. It took two years of careful digging to expose the entire chamber.
"Examining the painting on the west wall, scholars recognized figures and mythic scenes common to much later Maya art. It was the traditional Maya depiction of creation as it has been described in manuscripts some 13 centuries later. The world is supported by trees with roots running into the underworld and branches hold the sky. The trees represent the four corners of the world and water, earth, sky and paradise.
"In the mural, the maize god is setting up the tree at the center of the world and crowning himself king. Scenes depict the god's birth, death and resurrection. Other deities make blood sacrifices at each tree.
" 'Art speaks volumes, and we don't necessarily need the texts,' said Dr. Guernsey, the art historian.
"The San Bartolo art provided David Freidel, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University, with insights for interpreting a discovery his team made earlier at Yaxuna in the Yucatán. Members uncovered a ceremonial structure that contained a cloverleaf pattern like a quatrefoil. Beneath, they found pottery, an ax and other artifacts from the late Preclassic period but in the style of the earlier Olmec civilization. Dr. Freidel concluded that the Maya rulers at Yaxuna held ceremonies to connect their reign to the preceding Olmec culture, which faded away in the fifth century B.C.
"Other recent digs have revealed stone monuments, altars and figurines at La Naranjo, near Guatemala City, that was occupied as early as 800 B.C. Naranjo, Dr. Stuart said, 'is proving to be one of the most exciting excavations in the Maya area.'
"The chief excavator, Barbara Arroyo of the University of San Carlos in Guatemala, said Naranjo was an important ritual site near a water spring. The origin of the gods is associated with places where water flows.
"In his autobiography, 'Final Report,' being published this month by Thames & Hudson, Dr. Coe, the Yale Mayanist, concluded: 'The great age of Maya archaeology is far from over. In fact, it's just beginning.' "
"A Peruvian Woman Warrior of A.D. 450 Seems to Have Had Two Careers: A mummy of mystery has come to light in Peru," were the headlines of John Noble Wilford's May 17 story in The New York Times.
Wilford wrote: "She was a woman who died some 1,600 years ago in the heyday of the Moche culture, well before the rise of the Incas. Her imposing tomb suggests someone of high status. Her desiccated remains are covered with red pigment and bear tattoos of patterns and mythological figures.
"But the most striking aspect of the discovery, archaeologists said yesterday, is not the offerings of gold and semiprecious stones, or the elaborate wrapping of her body in fine textiles, but the other grave goods.
"She was surrounded by weaving materials and needles, befitting a woman, and 2 ceremonial war clubs and 28 spear throwers - sticks that propel spears with far greater force - items never found before in the burial of a woman of the Moche (pronounced MOH-chay).
"Was she a warrior princess, or perhaps a ruler? Possibly.
" 'She is elite, but somewhat of an enigma,' said John Verano, a physical anthropologist at Tulane University, who worked with the Peruvian archaeologists who made the discovery last year.
"Christopher B. Donnan of the University of California, Los Angeles, was not a member of the research team but inspected the mummy and the tomb soon after the find. 'It's among the richest female Moche burials ever found,' said Dr. Donnan, an archaeologist of Peruvian culture. 'The tomb combines things usually found either exclusively in male or female burials - a real mystery.'
"The National Geographic Society announced the discovery and is publishing details in its magazine's June issue. The excavations, more than 400 miles northwest of Lima, were supported by the Augusto N. Wiese Foundation of Peru.
"The Moche culture flourished in the coastal valleys of northern Peru in the first 700 years A.D. The people were master artisans and built huge adobe pyramids. The woman's tomb was near the summit of a pyramid called Huaca Cao Viejo, a cathedral of the Moche religion.
"Dr. Verano's X-ray examination revealed that the mummy was a young adult. Lying near her was the skeleton of another young woman who was apparently sacrificed by strangulation with a hemp rope, which was still around her neck. Such sacrifices were common in Andean cultures.
"Radiocarbon analysis of the rope indicated that the burial occurred around A.D. 450.
" 'Perhaps she was a female warrior, or maybe the war clubs and spear throwers were symbols of power that were funeral gifts from men,' Dr. Verano said."
"Native American grads get wish, may wear eagle feathers on caps" was the headline for Josh Kelley's May 25 story in The Arizona Republic.
The story: "Thanks to an appeal by tribal leaders to school administrators, a group of Native American students at Westwood High School in Mesa got their graduation wish: wearing eagle feathers on their caps.
"Administrators at Westwood and school district officials had previously rejected a request by students from the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community to wear the traditional feathers during the school's graduation ceremony tonight.
"But after meeting with tribal leaders twice in two days, Mesa Public Schools Superintendent Debra Duvall decided on Wednesday to allow the feathers to be displayed.
"Principal Helen Riddle and a member of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community Tribal Council informed Westwood students of the reversal, said Kathy Bareiss, school district spokeswoman. Eighteen students from the Salt River Reservation are graduating from Westwood.
"At Mesa high schools other than Westwood, principals will decide whether individual students will be allowed to wear feathers, but Duvall said she expects they will approve it.
"Joni Ramos, president of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, and other tribal leaders argued that the feathers are an important rite of passage with momentous spiritual and cultural significance for graduating seniors. Students typically receive the feathers from tribal elders or family members.
" 'We appreciate the officials of Mesa Public Schools for listening to our concerns and understanding the importance of the eagle feather in the Native American culture,' Ramos said in a statement.
"Duvall said tribal leaders convinced her that the eagle feathers honor students' achievement, which she said is consistent with the theme of graduation ceremonies: honoring students for their accomplishments.
" 'It's my understanding that the bestowing of the feather isn't just, "Here kid, here's the feather," ' Duval said. 'This is a time-honored tradition, and there is a long-standing association that . . . bestowing this feather is a designation of a major event, or a significant event, in the life of that individual.'
"Westwood High has 225 Native American students, including 112 from the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, much of which lies within the boundaries of the Mesa Unified School District. Districtwide, there are 452 Native American high school students, 149 of whom are from the Salt River Reservation.
"Before meeting with Salt River leaders, Mesa school officials had said students were only allowed to wear a traditional cap and gown for graduation with no other adornments or clothing, including military uniforms.
"Duvall said she is not concerned that students will try to wear adornments besides feathers tonight, but she said. 'Certainly it will make sense for us to sit down and review our expectations regarding graduation ceremonies or activities leading to those ceremonies prior to the '07 graduation.' "
A May 30 New York Times story by Sebnem Arsu and Campbell Robertson, "Wealth of Croesus, Returned by the Met, Stolen From Turkish Museum," was datelined Istanbul.
"An undisclosed number of objects from the treasure of King Croesus," the story began, "a collection that was returned in 1993 to Turkey from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York after a protracted legal battle, have been stolen from the Archeological Museum in Usak, a western Turkish city, and replaced with copies, Turkish authorities announced on Sunday.
"The government prosecutor's office said that nine people, including Kazim Akbiyikoglu, the director of the museum, have been detained as suspects. Two more suspects are being sought, the authorities said.
"Though there had been reports of thefts in the Turkish press, Sunday's announcement was the first time the government acknowledged the crime and the subsequent investigation.
"The collection, known as the Lydian Hoard, represents the artwork of the Lydian kingdom in western Asia Minor that flourished in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., under the reign of King Croesus, whose name has become a synonym for riches.
"A legal dispute over ownership of the Lydian objects began in 1970, when the Turkish minister of education contended that some of the Lydian artworks in the Metropolitan, as well as in other collections around the United States, had been illegally excavated and exported. The Turkish government sued for the objects' return in 1987, saying that they had been taken from burial mounds in the Usak region in 1966. The Met agreed to return them in 1993.
"A spokesman for the Met declined to comment Monday on the official confirmation of the theft in Usak, but Philippe de Montebello, the Met's director, made a reference to it in a May 4 speech at a conference in New York sponsored by the Association of Art Museum Directors.
"While discussing the problems that can arise when items are kept near their sites of origin, he used the Lydian objects in Usak as examples of what he called the "lack of concern for broad access" by the public.
" 'Now, because one piece has reportedly been recently stolen from the Ushak Museum, press attention has focused on the installation there,' he said. 'In an April 20 article in the Turkish press, the chief officer of the Ushak culture and tourism department stated, and I quote: "In the past five years 769 people visited the museum," in total. No further comment is required.'
"The discussion about the cultural ownership of antiquities has become more heated recently as countries like Italy and Greece have been trying to recover works they say were illegally taken from their soil. In February the Met agreed to give Italy 21 artifacts in its collection that experts say were illegally excavated from Italian soil, in return for long-term loans of Italian objects.
"Turkish authorities were notified of the theft five months ago, when Kayhan Kavas, the Usak regional governor, received an anonymous letter claiming that one of the most valuable pieces of the collection, a golden broach in the form of a winged sea horse, had been replaced by a fake. 'I took this anonymous letter very seriously and requested an inspector from the ministry of tourism and culture,' the official Turkish news agency quoted Mr. Kavas as saying today. 'We suspect this incident to be a part of an organized effort, and the investigation is being conducted accordingly.'
"Atilla Koc, the culture and tourism minister, remarked on the difficulty of preventing theft by museum officials. 'You can maintain external security,' he said, 'but we haven't yet invented a tool to protect them from the people inside.' "
John Noble Wilford's obituary of Craig Morris, "A Towering Figure in Inca Expeditions," appeared in The New York Times on June 16. Morris was 66.
Wilford wrote: "Craig Morris, an archaeologist who helped transform modern knowledge of the Inca civilization and a leader of research and exhibitions at the American Museum of Natural History, died Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 66 and lived in Greenwich Village.
"The cause was complications of heart surgery performed on Monday at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital, the museum announced.
"Dr. Morris was a towering figure in pre-Columbian archaeology, colleagues said. His research on the Inca culture took him on expeditions to the heights of the Andes and down to the valleys of the Pacific coast for years of vigorous excavations.
"One of his most intensive expeditions explored ruins of Huánuco Pampa, the huge Inca city at an elevation of 12,000 feet in the Andes. In the 1970's and 80's, he excavated more than 300 of the sites and some 4,000 crumbling buildings. Other archaeologists said Dr. Morris's excavations and interpretations transformed understanding of Inca urban life before the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century. His more recent research concentrated on the architecture and ceramics of coastal Peru as a reflection of Inca political and economic structure.
He also incorporated aerial and declassified satellite photography in his latest work. For 10 years, until 2004, Dr. Morris was dean of science at the American Museum, overseeing the staff of curators and coordinating their work on public exhibitions. 'He was a pillar of our community personally and intellectually,' said Ellen V. Futter, the museum president. Michael J. Novacek, senior vice president and provost of the museum, said that Dr. Morris had a major role in the renaissance of the scientific exhibitions at the museum in recent years. He took a direct hand in curating several temporary and permanent exhibits, including one on the royal tombs of Sipán in Peru.
"But it was Dr. Morris's own research that dominated his 31 years at the museum, where at his death he was a senior vice president and curator of anthropology. His expertise in Incan culture and his scholarly publications earned him membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
"He was also vice president of the Institute of Andean Research, treasurer of the Peruvian-American Research Foundation and an adjunct professor of anthropology at Columbia.
"Edward Craig Morris was born on Oct. 7, 1939, in Murray, Ky., and grew up there. As an undergraduate student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, he developed an interest in anthropology, and at the University of Chicago, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1967, his abiding fascination with Peruvian prehistory took root. This led to his principal work on three long-term field projects. Besides the 11-year research at Huánuco Pampa, he put in years at sites of the Chincha kingdom on the south coast of Peru and then at excavations on the southeastern frontier of the Inca realm on the slopes of the Bolivian Andes.
"Collaborating with Adriana von Hagen, an American writer living in Peru, he wrote 'The Cities of the Ancient Andes' and 'The Inca Empire and Its Andean Origins.' She is also co-author with him of a new book on art in the ancient Andes, expected to be published by Thames & Hudson. 'We were working together only last week on the final chapter,' Ms. von Hagen said by telephone from Lima. 'It's ready to go to our editor.'
"Dr. Morris is survived by a sister, Emily Morris Luther of Murray, Ky., and his partner, Alexei Baklanov of New York City. Colleagues and other archaeologists who knew him said that the Peruvian past was such a central part of his life that Dr. Morris maintained an apartment in Lima, his base of exploration over the years, and that Peruvian archaeologists considered him one of their own."
An art review by Holland Cotter in The New York Times, June 16, had the headline, "Mayan Treasures at the Met: Passing Strange Communications From the Beyond." The paragraphs about the theories of art historian Esther Pasztory are especially thought-provoking.
The review: "Treasures of the Sacred Maya Kings" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art gets a big gold 'A' for truth in advertising, at least as far as its treasures go. They are plentiful, rare and splendid, and I'll start by pointing out two.
"A carved wooden figure of a kneeling shaman, arms extended, time-scoured face entranced, is one of the greatest sculptures currently on view in the museum. Donatello and Tilman Riemenschneider would have loved it. And wait till you see the painted ceramic vessel known as the Dazzler Vase. With its red and green patterns like jade on fire, you'll know in a flash how it got its name.
"Not everything here sends up 'masterpiece' flares. Monumental stone sculpture of the kind closely identified with ancient Mesoamerica is largely absent. Much of the work stands at some remove from what many viewers would call beautiful. Certain items - a jadeite model of a pointed tool used for ritual self-mutilation - are just strange.
"Once you introduce the strange and the unbeautiful to a treasures show, you create some confusion; you upset expectations, ruffle the aesthetic pleasure principle. The confusion increases if the show gives clear signs of wanting to go beyond the beauty pageant, to tell a story and puzzle out a history, as this one wants to do.
"It is useful to know that when the exhibition had its debut at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, it was called 'Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship.' Was the New York name change an effort to give what sounded like an anthropological think-piece greater appeal? The word 'treasure' in a show is a time-tested crowd-puller. It promises an easy, passive art experience, as diverting and undemanding as window-shopping.
"But the Maya show feels far less like a stroll past Bergdorf's than like a visit to an archaeological dig. Some 150 objects, whole and fragmentary, fancy and plain, are spread through the galleries. Many are unfamiliar: they are recent finds from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Belize, traveling for the first time.
"It's evident that they add up to something, though it's not clear, at least at the beginning of the show, what that something might be. You have to do some work, some sorting, sifting and piecing together to get your bearings.
"The wall labels are a help. So is the catalog edited by the show's curators, Virginia M. Fields and Dorie Reents-Budet, with its wealth of up-to-date information. But the most valuable guide may be one that has no direct connection to the show, 'Thinking With Things: Toward a New Vision of Art' (university of Texas), a 2005 book by the art historian Esther Pasztory.
"Ms. Pasztory is a Mesoamerican specialist who has written, among other things, a fine book on Aztec art. But 'Thinking With Things' is different. It is an extended theoretical essay, which attempts to create, with the tools of art history and anthropology, nothing less than a pan-cultural definition of what art is and what it is for.
"I worked as a graduate assistant to Ms. Pasztory years ago when the book was germinating. And although it changed shape over time, its basic proposal remains intact: Many of the things we now call art - the very concept was largely a product of 18th-century Europe - were originally significant not primarily for their visual appeal but for their use as tools for thinking about, coping with, probing the world. Thought, not aesthetic taste, was art's essence.
"It is this use-value that has made art a universal phenomenon. Far from being transcendent and timeless, art was, and remains, a product of its culture and time.
"These proposals are not in themselves radical, but the breadth and intensity with which Ms. Pasztory applies them are. And when her view is brought to bear on the Maya show, a quirky treasures compendium becomes something else: a speculative study, through objects, of how political power developed in that culture and what it said about the Mayan's approach to the world.
"The models for Mayan kingship were ancient even in Mayan times. A small Olmec sculpture of a human ruler in the first gallery, dating from as early as 900 B.C, wears the three-leafed corn-shoot emblem of the Maize God, the source of fertility. The same insignia appears, centuries later, on images of Mayan kings, marking them as a fruitful link between earth, heaven and the underworld. Monarchy was, in concept, organic and holistic, through it all things were connected.
"This concept of fecund kingship is elaborated in an early Mayan relief. Dated from 200 to 50 B.C., it depicts a monarch who has been transformed into a fantastic hybrid of bird and tree, with a maize plant flaring like a torch above his head. Are we meant to take this as an image of a costumed ceremony or as a supernatural vision? Either way, it turns the figure of the king into a magical abstraction, a living pictograph, an awesome piece of spiritual machinery.
"The royal image is somewhat softened and humanized in sections of the show devoted to details of court life, and particularly in a display of luxury tableware. Platters painted with cartoon-like figures and bowls shaped like squash and parrots are the work of artists with individual styles and made for a good-humored, cosmopolitan clientele.
"So is a funky censer in the form of a nubile young woman emerging from a pile of cacao beans like a dancer from a cake. She is ready to entertain, and liquid chocolate was the Mayan party drink of choice.
"Hallucinogens were also in use, though primarily, it seems, in religious contexts. They served as aids to divination: the carved kneeling figure may be a priest in a drug-induced trance. They may also have eased the rigors of bloodletting, some of it self-inflicted, some of it not (the Mayan penchant for human sacrifice is well established) through which kings enriched the earth and communicated with the beyond.
"That world beyond was of paramount importance. After death, a deified ruler became a divine ancestor who could help the living. This merging of life with afterlife, human with divine, represented a balance of powers on which the Mayan cosmos was built. One way or another, most of the objects in the show, whether beautiful by Western standards, or 'primitive' and scary, embody it. And it is spectacularly distilled in a royal funerary mask made between the third and sixth centuries A.D., when Mayan power was at its height.
"Pieced together from chips of jade, its skin is a light blue-green, the color of fresh shoots. The obsidian eyes, dark as seeds, stare unfocused as if the ruler depicted were dreaming while awake. Two shell bands, curling like roots, emerge from his lips. They represent his breath, inhaled and exhaled, even after death.
"This object would qualify as a treasure, a masterpiece, by almost any modern standard. Surely the Maya found it visually magnetic too. But its real value lay elsewhere, in its actualization of the idea - the belief, the hope - of life continuing in and emerging from death. With this in mind, they placed the mask in a tomb and left it there, probably assuming that it would never be seen again by human eyes. That didn't matter. Its energy would pulse away in the dark, endlessly germinating. That concept was what counted, and it is still alive, if you think it is, in this show at the Met."
"Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings" remains at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue (at 82nd Street), through Sept. 10.
"African Mask Takes Record $7.5 million at auction" was the headline of an AP story on a Paris auction that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on June 18.
Datelined Paris, the story began: "A celebrated 19th century mask by the West African Fang tribe fetched more than $7.5 million at auction in Paris, a record for a work of primitive art, organizers said Sunday.
"The mask, which is said to have inspired artist Pablo Picasso, brought in four times its estimated price of $1.9 million on Saturday, organizers of the sale at the Drouot auction house said. The buyer's identity was not disclosed.
"The mask was part of one of France's premier private collections of primitive art, which was on the block at Drouot this weekend. Started by Pierre Verite and his son Claude in the 1920s, the collection features works mostly from France's former colonies in West and Central Africa.
"Though it was kept out of public view for most of the 20th century, the collection made a big impression on celebrated artists such as Picasso, Henri Matisse and surrealist Andre Breton, who saw it in the 1930s.
"More than 500 pieces were up for auction and were estimated to bring in between $19 million and $25 million - though prices appeared to be rising far beyond those expectations.
"Of 96 pieces sold Saturday, eight passed the mark of $1.27 million, said auctioneer Muriel Berlinghi-Domingo.
" 'Prices are soaring in this sale, which is perhaps the last of this importance,' she said. 'As this is a historic collection, and many of the objects have almost never been displayed, we're seeing a lot of competition.'
"France will soon unveil the Musee du Quai Branly, a major new museum championed by President Jacques Chirac that will house the country's large and until now scattered collection of primitive art."
"Paris Museum Pays Tribute to Tribal Arts" was the headline for a brief Associated Press follow-up story written by Angela Doland that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on June 20. A longer version of that story, which ran on the Internet at sfgate.com, is below.
Datelined Paris, the story began: "A new museum, located in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, celebrates art forms sometimes overlooked by the Paris cultural establishment: carved African masks, feather headdresses from the Amazon, dangling silver earrings for Middle Eastern brides.
"French presidents traditionally leave their artistic stamp on the city of Paris, and the $293 million Quai Branly Museum, to be inaugurated Tuesday, is Jacques Chirac's contribution.
"Planned since Chirac took office in 1995, it showcases the so-called tribal arts of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, at a time when France is engulfed in debate about how to heal the scars of its colonial past and accept a multicultural vision of its present.
"Journalists had the first peek at the museum on Monday, while the acrid smell of paint still filled the galleries and workers rushed to put down flooring and finish displays. The main building - one of four structures in a garden complex - is modernistic and elongated, and it guides visitors on a circuitous path among glass cases of treasures.
"The museum does not claim to offer a well-rounded sampling of tribal arts. There are many works from Mali, for example, and only a few from Hawaii, simply because some countries - especially former colonies - are more represented in France's national collections.
"It also offers no explanation of how ritualistic objects were used, one of many sources of debate surrounding the museum. A visitor who admires a funeral mannequin from the South Pacific - a spooky creation of bone, spider webs, pig's teeth and shells - may wonder at its exact purpose. Was it carried in a procession? What did it symbolize?
"The museum says the art needs no explanation: Its beauty should speak for itself.
" 'The big difference between this museum and ethnological museums is that we are not here to give a lesson about things,' museum director Stephane Martin said. 'We are here to mediate between us, Europeans ... and the non-Western world.' The goal is a 'dialogue of cultures,' and the museum mixes pieces together with little to distinguish their origins. Embroidered costumes from Vietnam are on display near stone-encrusted earrings from the Middle East.
"Journalists' initial reaction was mixed: Some found the museum too dark, cluttered and lacking in context, while Le Monde newspaper said the 3,500-piece collection was 'on stage spectacularly.' Some historians have recently asked whether the museum might 'ghettoize' the works by separating them from other art forms.
"Quai Branly has been controversial since Chirac announced the project, catching up with late Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, who marked the capital with the Louvre Pyramid and the Bastille Opera, among other projects.
"Some complained because Quai Branly stripped works from two other museums - the National Museum of the Arts of Africa and Oceania, which shut down and is to replaced by a museum on immigration, and the Museum of Mankind.
"Then there was the question of what to call the new landmark. Any name hinting at 'primitive arts' was ruled out because of the term's inherent Western condescension. The state eventually opted for a non-controversial title, after the street on the Seine River where it is located.
"At the heart of debate is whether masterpieces from Africa, for example, would be better off in their country of origin. Much of the French state's collection of nearly 300,000 pieces of indigenous non-Western art was brought back by colonizers and scientific research missions.
"Jean Nouvel, the museum's architect, argues that it will help repair the wrongs of the colonial era.
" 'There is no better way to give these civilizations back their virtue and nobility,' said Nouvel, who designed another Paris landmark, the Arab World Institute.
"Issues about France's colonial past are still sensitive here - just last year, parliament passed a law requiring schoolbooks to highlight the 'positive role' of French colonialism. The term was later stripped from the legislation, but the law was an embarrassment for France.
"Chirac, completing what is likely the final year of his 12-year presidency, is a fan of indigenous cultures who successfully pushed to get the Louvre to open a wing of tribal arts. He says the new museum was 'the result of a political desire to see justice rendered to non-European cultures.' "
"Imperialist? Moi? Not the Musée du Quai Branly," by Alan Riding, is another look at the new tribal museum in Paris published in The New York Times on July 22.
Datelined Paris, Riding's story began, "President Jacques Chirac of France has always liked African and Asian art, as he demonstrated with a flourish this week when he inaugurated the Musée du Quai Branly, a large, eye-catching building costing $295 million and devoted entirely to non-Western art. Announced in 1996 and years in the making, it is the first major museum to open in Paris since the Musée d'Orsay in 1986.
"The museum, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel, stands on a prime piece of real estate, on the Left Bank of the Seine, one block from the Eiffel Tower. Its gallery space is no less impressive. Half is used to display 3,500 objects from the museum's collection of 300,000 works from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas; the rest is given over to temporary exhibitions.
"The museum's goal is simple and ambitious: to treat non-Western art with the same deference that, say, the Louvre gives to Greek, Roman and Renaissance art and the Musée d'Orsay gives to the Impressionists. In other words it is an artistic project with the eminently political objective of proclaiming France's openness to the world.
" 'There is no hierarchy among the arts, just as there is no hierarchy among peoples,' Mr. Chirac said at the opening ceremony on Tuesday. 'It is upon this conviction - the equal dignity of the cultures of the world - that this museum is founded.'
"The museum, he added, is a homage to peoples who have suffered conquest, violence and humiliation. 'It aims to promote among the public at large,' he said, 'a different, more open and respectful view, dispelling the clouds of ignorance, condescension and arrogance which in the past have often nourished distrust, contempt and rejection.'
"The museum opens to the public on Friday, but it has already been visited by museum directors, anthropologists, private sponsors and the news media. And, as occurred with Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, among others, the first work of art to be examined here has been the museum itself. It is the third built in Paris by Mr. Nouvel, after the Institute of the Arab World and the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art.
"While the new museum comprises four connected buildings, one with an exterior wall covered with vegetation, the dominant feature is a 600-foot-long exhibition hall, which mirrors the gentle bend in the Seine and is peppered with 26 multicolored protruding boxes. This pierlike structure is in turn suspended so that visitors can wander freely around a large and soon-to-be-lush garden that is separated from the busy traffic of the Quai Branly by a 39-foot-high wall.
"The museum's atrium is tall enough to accommodate a 46-foot American Indian totem pole from British Columbia, while a glass tower displays some of the museum's musical instruments. A curving 600-foot-long ramp, inevitably reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, then leads to the display area.
"Unusually, this space is one large gallery, albeit divided by leather-covered partitions into the collection's four main geographical regions. Within each, free-standing display cabinets create a kind of warren, which encourages visitors to explore rather than to follow a particular path. From indoors, the mysterious boxes protruding from the building become small thematic rooms.
"The museum spotlights individual objects in a generally dark environment, which is dramatic but also emphasizes a work's aesthetic appeal at the expense of detailed information about its origin.
"The range of works is nonetheless impressive, with remarkable examples of the masks and statues from Africa and Oceania that a century ago so impressed Fauvist and Cubist artists in Paris. The Americas section embraces pre-Columbian and American Indian art, while the Asian works address daily life from Indonesia to Vietnam. (Ancient Asian masterpieces remain in the Musée Guimet, across the Seine.)
"In all, a walk through the Musée du Quai Branly (pronounced kay bran-LEE) resembles a journey in which distances of time and space are telescoped into the here and now by the simple beauty and mystery of the works.
"Yet even now the institution remains inseparable from politics. Having noted that his predecessor, President François Mitterrand, built I. M. Pei's glass pyramid at the Louvre, the Bastille Opera, the Grande Arche de la Défense and the François Mitterrand French National Library, Mr. Chirac evidently sees this museum as the cultural monument to his two terms in office. He observed last week that it would be 'a great honor' if one day it were to carry his name.
"To realize this project, though, Mr. Chirac had to impose his will. The bulk of the museum's collection comes from the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens, now closed (its building at the Porte Dorée will become a Museum of Immigration), and from the Musée de l'Homme, which complained bitterly over the loss of 250,000 ethnographic objects.
"At the same time, to underline his belief in the equality of Western and non-Western art, Mr. Chirac overruled objections from the Louvre that it was not a 'universal' museum and obliged it to cede its Pavillon des Sessions to 100 masterpieces of African, Asian, Oceanic and American art.
"The complexity of creating a museum was further emphasized by the debate over its name. In another era it might have been called a museum of 'primitive art,' but that term is now considered pejorative. For this same reason, a popular name - 'arts premiers,' or 'first arts' - was also abandoned. Finally, after other names were discussed, the museum's location on the Quai Branly offered the safest solution.
"The imperial past of France also hovers over the museum. Although $28.7 million was spent acquiring about 8,500 works, much of the museum's collection came originally from French colonies. And while the museum faces no claim for restitution of works gathered by 19th- and early-20th-century explorers, administrators and military officers, a debate about the colonial past is gaining strength here, fed partly by tensions over immigrants from developing nations.
"Other questions have been raised about the very philosophy behind this museum. Do pre-Columbian Mayan figures and 19th-century African masks, for example, have anything in common beyond needing a fine display window in Paris? And, more pertinently, should objects that were not created as art be presented as art, isolated from their ethnographic context?
"Stéphane Martin, the museum's president, said that with its accompanying dance, music and theater programs, the museum should soon become part of cultural life in Paris. Through its temporary exhibitions, he said, it also intends to work closely with similar museums around the world, notably in countries represented in the collection, to become something of a cultural crossroads.
"But for Mr. Chirac, it seems, the museum is above all a response to the new political imperative of rejecting ethnocentrism. Describing the opening as an event of great cultural, political and moral importance, he said the museum offered 'an incomparable aesthetic experience and at the same time an indispensable lesson in humanity for our times.' "
Again from The New York Times, from Wendy Moonan's Antiques column on June 23, "An African Auction in Paris As a New Museum Opens" is about yet another important tribal arts auction scheduled to coincide with the opening of the Musée de Quai Branley.
Moonan writes: "This week Paris is celebrating African art. The Nicole and John Dintenfass collection of African art is to be auctioned today by Sotheby's France, in a sale scheduled to coincide with the long-awaited opening of the Musée du Quai Branly, the Paris museum devoted to the arts of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.
"Mr. Dintenfass, a New York psychiatrist and the son of Terry Dintenfass, a Manhattan dealer of American art who died in 2004, has been collecting African art since 1968, when he went to Biafra to study faith healers.
" 'I fell in love with the culture,' he said, 'and when I came back to New York I took courses on African art at Columbia and N.Y.U. and started collecting.'
"In the early 1970's he spent three years in England with the United States Air Force. There he met the British artist Josef Herman, and together they toured Europe looking for the rare small-scale African sculptures that collectors call miniatures, 15 of which are in the sale.
"After his marriage, he and Nicole bought more African sculptures, from dealers and private collectors. ('Married to him, I needed to like African art,' Ms. Dintenfass said. 'It became a passion.')
"Their collecting criteria is simple. 'If we see something beautiful, we try to learn more about its meaning and function,' Mr. Dintenfass said. 'I'm not African, so I can't look at an object like someone from Africa. The appeal is visual. What resonates is what a piece expresses to us.'
"Since many collectors of African art are in Paris for the museum opening, the sale may do well. Last Friday and Saturday, more than a thousand people each day attended the sale of the primitive art collection of Pierre and Claude Vérité at the Hôtel Drouot auction house in Paris. The sale realized $54 million.
"Mr. Dintenfass said he was not selling 'a majority' of his collection."
