When Dennis Wise and Malina Lopez wanted to use Burke Museum collections in their work, they weren’t interested in objects or specimens for the “usual” reasons.
Often, the people who use Burke collections are scientists and scholars. But for Wise and Lopez, a photographer and food stylist respectively, using Burke collections was all about getting creative and helping people see objects and specimens in new ways.
Natural history specimens make unexpected appearances in this beautiful series of still life
photographs. Keep reading for more images and the lists of specimens within them.
The journey from walrus to mug is actually shorter than you might think, as a few objects in the Burke's collection show.
First, the mug.
Photo credit: Richard Brown Photography
Object ID: Cat. No 1-2177
Gift of Lucille Christ
This mug was found in the mid-1950s when some children were digging in a backyard in Seattle's Laurelhurst neighborhood, but the mug probably originated in Alaska over 100 years ago.
Around the turn of the 20th century, mugs like this were made by Alaskan Native carvers to sell to tourists. This mug was most likely sold or traded to someone in Alaska who then brought it down the coast to Seattle. From there, the mug either got lost or thrown away and became buried.
After the mug was found, it was eventually donated to the Burke's archaeology collection, where it lives today.
Sharlene Santana holds a Lophostoma silvicolum bat.
Sharlene Santana is an evolutionary biologist and the new curator of mammals here at the Burke Museum. She studies how behavior, diet, anatomy and function result in bursts of diversification in tropical bats – mostly from Panama, Costa Rica and Venezuela.
Sharlene was born and spent most of her life in Venezuela. Growing up in the tropics fostered her love for animals and interest in their diversity.
Some of the tropical forests where Sharlene has worked no longer exist because they have been cut down. While Sharlene releases most of the bats she studies in the field, she collects some specimens to help preserve the biodiversity of these increasingly threatened habitats. In her research today and other studies in the future, these specimens in collections will help answer questions that haven’t even been asked.
I recently sat down with Sharlene to ask her why and how she studies bats.
At the Burke, we bring together people, objects and
the stories that make them meaningful. As Mexico and other cultures
around the world celebrate Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos) on November 1
and 2, we want to share some of the Day of the Dead objects in our
Ethnology collection and a special new sculpture on display for our visitors to
enjoy.
Day of the Dead is a time for families and communities to
welcome home the visiting spirits of the deceased and celebrate the love they
shared. Rather than a time for sadness and mourning, this holiday, is a
celebration of life and is filled with all kinds of individual and culturally
meaningful objects that remind us of the past.
Preparations for Day of the Dead often begin weeks in
advance. The celebration traditionally includes dances, festivals, family
gatherings and religious services. Families also place photographs of their
deceased relatives on candlelit ofrendas (altars) with elaborate wreaths and crosses, prepare special
foods – such as chocolate skulls and pan de muerto (bread of the dead) and lay trails
of brightly-colored marigolds to help guide the spirits home.
Fossils are an important key to understanding life on our planet. They can tell us a lot about creatures who inhabited the Earth millions of years before us. Finding a fossil is one thing. Figuring out what the fossil once was, is another. That’s where geologists like Ed East come in.
Ed is a retired geologist and longtime Burke Museum volunteer and donor with a keen eye for identifying fossils. But when he recently was stuck while trying to identify rare fossils, he looked for a creative approach to discovering what they were and started drawing.
I sat down with Ed on his last day as a volunteer at the Burke Museum. After more than 30 years he had a lot of memories and research to sort through. He pulled out a file folder and spread dozens of fossil drawings across his desk, but before he could start describing them, a photograph caught his eye. Ed gently unpinned the old photo of a clean-shaven young man on his graduation day. "This is me when I attended school here," he said with a smile.
Figure 1: Chilkat Dancing Blanket, Tlingit, late 19th-century. Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, 1-1587.
My first encounter with the alluring and boldly graphic ceremonial dancing blanket, known extensively as the Chilkat blanket, was this past summer. A friend had asked me to assist in suspending one of these northern Pacific Coast Native woven creations from a wall in his gallery, and I was at once taken aback by the complex, fractured design, the striking tightness of the weave and the subtle—yet impactful shifts—in the blanket’s texture, as well as the rhythmic nature of the limited color palette. What awed me the most, though, struck me while gently encouraging the layers of fringe cascading from the base of the design field to lay flat against the wall. It was at this point that my friend enlightened me to the fact that the vertical strands (known as the warps) concealed beneath their fluffy vanilla exterior of mountain goat wool a heart of cedar bark, which provided stability and substance to the blanket. These vertical warp strands function as the supporting ribs for the whole textile, and were breathtakingly delicate to the touch! As I ran across historic photograph after historic photograph within the Burke’s Ethnology Archives depicting noble Tlingit and Haida figures enveloped in these expressionistic and esteemed Chilkat blankets (Figure 2), I knew that I needed to explore the cultural identity embedded in these woven garments.
Figure 2:A photograph taken in the commercial photography studio of Case & Draper based out of Skagway, Alaska in the beginning years of the 20th century documents Chief Anotklosk of the Tlingit Taku wearing his opulent ceremonial Chilkat dancing blanket in the traditional manner. (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture, Case and Draper Collection.)
Unpacking a Phrase: What is a Chilkat blanket? What Native culture was the brainchild of this weaving art?
Do you know what malacology is without looking it up? Malacology is the study of molluscs – which includes squid, snails, and many of the critters that leave beautiful shells on our beaches. The Burke Museum has a malacology collection and also a collection of corals and the shells of non-molluscs. “It’s what most people would call a shell collection,” explains Dr. Kirsten Rowell, the Burke’s curator of malacology. Most people would call her a curator of shells.
Dr. Rowell’s job is to sort out the malacology collection, which has never had a formal curator. The collection began in the 1890’s when P. Brooks Randolph, one of the founding members of the Pacific Northwest Young Naturalists, joined efforts to explore, collect, and catalogue the diverse flora and fauna in the PNW. “The malacology collection used to have a pretty prominent role at the Burke – the Mezzanine level [of the Museum, now a staff-only area] was funded in the early 1960 by an National Science Foundation grant to support the invertebrate collection”.” A room filled with shells once stood where the Burke's gift shop now stands. “Shells have always captivated the interest of people walking on the beach. They’re like the birds of the sea, they are beautiful and accessible… people tend to gravitate towards collecting them and learning more about them.”
Photo courtesy Dr. Rowell
Dr. Rowell’s interest in the collection is a little different. She’s actually not a malacologist (she doesn't focus on molluscs). She’s an aquatic biologist and ecologist. She uses the malacology collection at the Burke to study past aquatic environments. People have been collecting shells for a very long time, and that gives us a unique record of what water was like at the time those shells' inhabitants were alive. Dr. Rowell uses the shells (and a technique called geochemistry) to study animal populations, ocean acidification, and climate change at specific sites around the world.
For example, Dr. Rowell and her colleagues studied the shells of black murex snails, a species that is heavily harvested in the Gulf of California. Information from the shells told them how fast the snails were growing, and how much harvesting local populations might tolerate.
The Burke's malacology collection contains shells from around the world. If we know when and where they were collected, they can provide us with valuable information about what their habitat used to be like. By comparing this information with modern measurements, we can track changes in aquatic environments over long periods of time.
The shells at the Burke - like all the other specimens here - are like a library, ready to help us answer questions about the natural world.
Have you ever been to the Burke and wondered what's in the rest of the building? Behind the exhibits (actually, under them, around them, and above them!) are offices, the exhibit workshop, and enough cabinets full of wonder to make Indiana Jones jealous.
In this edition ofScience Behind-the-Scenes, meet the Burke's mammal collection and find out why we keep drawers full of flattened animals and their bones!
Mammals on display at Meet the Mammals
Mammalogy is the study of mammals (a mammal is an animal with a backbone that has hair and produces milk for its newborns). Over 5,400 species of mammals live on Earth today and many more species have lived and died since the time of the dinosaurs. That's right—running around the feet ofAllosaurusandStegosaurus werelittle furry mammals.
Fossil mammals can be found in the paleontology collection. Humans are mammals but anything to do with humans is usually found in the archaeology or ethnology collections. The mammalogy collection houses all the Burke's "recent" (non-fossilized) mammals—bones, skins, whole animals, flattened animals. Mammalogy has everything from exotic animal skins confiscated from smugglers to squirrel skeletons used by scientists to study local squirrel populations.
Figure 1: Tlingit berry-basket, late 1800s. Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. George Emmons Collection, No. 1702.
Amidst the many hours devoted to research papers and projects during my graduate schooling, I became very intrigued with historic photographic images of Native American cultures. As these images filled my moments of contemplation and my laptop’s hard drive, a fire was set alight within me to explore the handicrafts produced by the Native hands depicted in these historical photographs. Each day as I walked through the Burke’s Pacific Voices exhibit en route to class, I became more and more enamored with the beautifully crafted and lustrous twined basketry works on display. But these baskets were completely enigmatic for me…how were they made, and how could one differentiate between the baskets of various Northwest Coast cultures?
In the spirit of tomorrow’s Artifact ID Day here at the Burke (this Saturday, January 7th from 1-3:30 pm), I would like to shed light on some of the greatest differentiating characteristics between the spruce baskets of two neighboring cultures from the northern Northwest Coast—the Tlingit (pronounced “TLINK-it”) of what is now southeastern Alaska, and the Haida (pronounced “HIGH-dah”) of the Haida Gwaii (or Queen Charlotte Islands) of British Columbia as well as the southernmost portion of Alaska’s Prince of Wales Island (See a map here).
The Woven Worlds of the Tlingit and Haida
The collecting of Native American baskets across America was earnestly advertised during the last decades of the 19th through the early 20th century in journals and newspapers alike, with one writer of 1891 calling the accumulating craze “the latest fad among artistic people.”*
Shared Sensibilities Despite the introduction of new basketry forms and design motifs with the development of a white tourist-fueled industry, the women of both the Tlingit and the Haida—who bore sole responsibility for the gathering of materials and the weaving of basket works—remained faithful to their native weaving techniques and materials. The Tlingit and the Haida shared in their artful manipulation of split root derived from the spruce tree (referred to as “seet” by the Tlingit) to produce exceptionally vocal woven basketry creations. The body of their baskets—most commonly in the form of open, gradually flaring cylindrical berry-picking baskets--were intricately formed by means of twined weaving techniques: fine strands of peeled and split spruce are manipulated, the lustrous outer part of the root utilized for the strands to be visible on the exterior basket (known as wefts) are woven horizontally in a variety of techniques over passive vertical strands derived from the center of the root (known as the warps, and in most cases concealed in totality by the wefts). The most customary twined weaving stitch was the plain (or two-strand) Z-twining stitch, as illustrated in the brief video clip below, producing a striking uniform textured surface of vertical ridges akin to an ear of corn. The “Z-twining” refers to the direction of each stitch’s slant down to the right.
Movie clip from “Baskets of the Northwest People, Gifts from the Grandmothers,” courtesy of YouTube member SwinomishTribalMedia.
Beauty in the Details: Distinguishing Characteristics of Tlingit and Haida Baskets Overlapping construction techniques and weaving materials can easily mislead one to associate the incorrect culture with a basketry treasure; however, outlined below I detail the greatest idiosyncrasies that can aid in distinguishing between the major basket types of the Tlingit and the Haida.
(1) Visual Materialization of Basket Orientation During Weaving
Favored as the most consistent telltale sign for differentiating a Tlingit basket from a Haida is the point of termination on a basket, which is visually manifested in a vertical band along one point on the basket wall. At this point of termination where the weft strands are connected to each other, a step in the alignment of the vertical ridges occurs. The angle of this step, referred to as a jog, is reflective of orientation of the basket during the weaving process as mandated by cultural customs.
The Tlingit’s jog configuration (Figure 2) shows a “jog down,” where each row is slightly above the previous (row on left side of termination is higher than the row to the right). This “jog down” is the by-product of the Tlingit’s custom of weaving baskets in an upright position (Figure 3).
Figure 2: This close-up view of the termination on a Tlingit basket shows the characteristic “jog down” where each row is slightly above the previous. (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, No. 1-916.)
Figure 3: A photograph taken in the commercial photography studio based out of Skagway, Alaska in the beginning years of the 20th century documents the way a Tlingit woman would weave her basket in an upright position. (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Case and Draper Collection).
The Haida’s jog configuration (Figure 4), on the other hand, displays a “jog up,” where each row is slightly below the previous (row on left side of termination is lower than the row to the right). This “jog up” is the outgrowth of the Haida’s custom of weaving baskets in an inverted position (Figure 5).
Figure 4: This close-up view of the termination on a Haida basket shows the characteristic “jog up” where each row is slightly below the previous. (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, No. 1-1520.)
Figure 5: This photograph taken in the Haida village of Masset in 1897 by photographer Edward P. Allen for The Field Museum of Chicago suspends for perpetuity the customary way by which a Haida woman would weave her basket in a downward position with the basket wall’s warp strands pointing downward. (Courtesy of the Field Museum, Neg. CSA854)
(2) Culturally Favored Design Techniques
The Tlingit and the Haida each possessed a unique set of cultural beliefs that were encoded within the physical form of their basketry works. Each basket maker revealed her individual artistic sense within an established vocabulary of aesthetics and design elements regulated by her people’s vernacular weaving style. While stylistic exceptions do exist as a result of cross fertilization of ideas and techniques due to intermarriage between tribes, as well as a result of tourist demand (hence the importance of examining the termination point on a basket), the following stylistic generalizations can be helpful in establishing a Tlingit basket from a Haida.
The twined basketry works of the Tlingit are typified by the punctuation of boldly colored and finely integrated geometric forms that mingle with great variety across the outer wall of the basket, typically within the confines of horizontal design bands. Customarily on variations of berry baskets these colorful design motifs were woven over three horizontal bands that encircle the form—two wider and matching bands sandwiching a third smaller “tying band” in the middle—that are bookended by margins along the top rim and base of the basket of non-dyed spruce root (See Figure 1). Many of the design motifs symbolically represent in abstracted form natural subjects, but, after 1880, also were literally transcribed from ornamental blankets and fabrics acquired through trade with white settlers. The Technicolor geometric form decoration was applied by a weaving technique known as false embroidery in which pre-prepared colorfully dyed grass strands or maidenhair fern strands (known for its reddish to blackish purple hue and glossy appearance) are wrapped simultaneously with the horizontal weft strand as it is woven over the vertical warp. The false embroidery never passes to the inside and can only be viewed on the exterior wall of the basket. Noteworthy as well is that the colorful strands of false embroidery slant in the opposite direction of the plain z-twining that structurally defines much of a Tlingit basket (Figure 6).
Figure 6: Up close one can view the Tlingit’s characteristic false embroidery technique. Notice that each stitch of the colored strands slants up to the right—the opposite direction of the natural spruce root plain z-twining (visible at the top of this detail photo) that structurally composes much of a typical Tlingit basket (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, No. 2300.)
Specimens of Haida basketry are markedly more understated than that of the Tlingit in design and color choices. The power of Haida twined creations come from the restrained bands circumventing the basket’s wall, and typically from subtle shifts in weaving techniques that appear in a band along the basket’s rim. The narrow horizontal bands around the basket—which typically are black, green or brown in color, but also occasionally red—are created by dying some of the spruce root weft strands prior to weaving and incorporating them directly into the ‘fabric’ of the basket with plain z-twining (Figure 7). The understated elegance of Haida baskets is also typically typified by a thicker horizontal band of skip-stitch (or twill twining) present along the basket’s rim that produces a raised geometric design, as seen in Figure 4.
Figure 7: An exemplary specimen of Haida twined spruce root basketry. (Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, No. 4590.)
Posted By:Christy Hansen, Ethnology
* Charles E. Holder, “A California Craze; the Latest Fad Among Artistic People: Collections of Indian Baskets,” Placer Herald, July 10, 1891, p7.
To learn more about Tlingit and Haida Spruce Root Baskets, see:
Sharon Busby, Spruce Root Basketry of the Haida and Tlingit (Seattle: Marquand Books, Inc., in association with University of Washington Press, 2003).
George T. Emmons, The Basketry of the Tlingit and The Chilkat Blanket, reprint edition (USA: Friends of the Sheldon Jackson Museum, 1993).
Frances Paul, Spruce Root Basketry of the Alaska Tlingit (United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs—Division of Education, Haskel Press, 1944).
Erna Gunther, Design Units on Tlingit Baskets (Sitka, Alaska: Sheldon Jackson Museum, 1984).
I personally have grown deeply appreciative of, and immensely fascinated by, Seattle-based photographer Edward S. Curtis’ photographic- and life- endeavors over the past few years in connection with my thesis work. Tucked away in the Burke’s Ethnology Archives is a little-known treasure trove of material related to Curtis’ 1914 ethnographic melodrama In the Land of the Head-Hunters—the first ethnographic “documentary” motion picture of its kind, depicting a romanticized pre-contact view of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) culture of British Columbia, Canada.
Figure 1 The hand-painted artist’s mock-up housed in the Burke’s Ethnology Archives displays the development of one of the promotional posters created to advertise Edward S. Curtis’ 1914 ethnographic melodrama In the Land of the Head-Hunters. (Image courtesy of The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, ‘In the Land of the War Canoes’ Collection, Ethnology Archives).
Upon my first encounter with the Burke’s archival collection associated with the film, I was instantly struck by a vibrant hand-painted artist’s mock-up, or prototype, for a promotional poster to advertise Curtis’ film (Figure 1). Not only was this mock-up a visual spectacle—a poster child (pun intended) for the Arts and Crafts style with its simplified forms, bold abstraction of color and angular lines, but also an enigma. What was the history behind this poster, and particularly, what was the story of the polychrome carved cedar grizzly bear so boldly illustrated?
The Burke’s prototype, dating from early- to mid-1914, was eventually produced as an official lithography poster by the H. C. Minor Litho Co. advertising the December 7, 1914 premiere of Head-Hunters in New York at the Casino Theatre (Figure 2). The carved grizzly bear depicted holds a dynamic real-life social biography of its own right: metamorphosing from an element of a traditional and culturally-valuable potlatch symbol, to an idealized symbol of “nativeness” as a stage prop, to a constituent in an decontextualized tourist attraction, and finally to a hidden gem within a museum’s storage.
Figure 2 The official 1914 poster exhibiting the film’s iconic carved grizzly bear. While the official poster is markedly more simplistic in its final rendition than the mock-up, the final poster would have still appealed greatly to the middle- and upper-classes of America at the time who would have been spellbound by this vibrant and unbridled expression of the then-believed “vanishing” Native cultures of the Northwest coast. (Image courtesy of Bill Utley Collection)
The grizzly is in fact part of a two-figured Thunderbird house post, one of set, carved initially between 1900 and 1910 by the renowned Kwakwaka’wakw carver Charlie James for Chief Tsa-wee-nok of Gway'i (Kingcome Inlet) as visual public displays of his family crests. According to a ledger record penned by George Hunt, Curtis’ invaluable Tlingit and Kwakwaka’wakw informant and assistant for the motion picture, it appears that the two poles were purchased in the summer of 1913 to be utilized extensively as stage props within the film (markedly the first appearance of totem poles in moving picture history!), each being transformed with physical augmentations to signal distinctive structures within the film (Figures 3 & 4). In 1927, the two house posts were erected within an educationally-intended outdoor totem park, purchased and erected by the Art, Historical, and Scientific Association of Vancouver (AHSAV) in Stanley Park. While both posts were in subsequent decades replicated, the originals being placed in safekeeping within the Museum of Vancouver (an institution created by AHSAV), the house posts have become one of the most popular tourist attractions in British Columbia (Figure 5).
Figure 3 The thunderbird and grizzly house posts are shown here in a still from Curtis’ film, representing the house of Waket in the tale, the house of the heroine’s father. (Image from Edward Curtis’ 1915 book In the Land of the Head-Hunters).
Figure 4 With the simple accessory of carved figures of Dzoonokwa, the man-eating giantess, over the grizzly bears’ bellies and the elimination of the thunderbirds’ expansive wings, the house posts are transformed into the setting of the ruthless villain, Yaklus’, house. (Image by Edmund S. Schwinke, originally housed in the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture)
Figure 5 The Kwakwaka’wakw house posts as seen erected in Stanley Park, sans wings, via a tourist postcard from the late 1920s. Shortly after the poles were raised by the Art, Historical, and Scientific Association of Vancouver, the organization’s promotional pamphlet for the park stated, “The proposed village, and the totems already erected, will represent the work of the Kwakiutl Indians in particular, and the Coast Indians in general. The totem is an indication of an old and wide culture. It points to the past. The past illuminates the present.”(Image courtesy of eBay member lusitania-postcard. Quote from John C. Goodfellow, The Totem Poles in Stanley Park (Vancouver, B.C.: The Art, Historical, and Scientific Association of Vancouver, B.C., [unspecified date]), 15.)
Watch a brief clip from Curtis’ film yourself that showcases Kwakwaka’wakw performers involved in a dance festival. Notice the thunderbird and grizzly bear house posts prominently displayed in the background.
Posted By: Christy Hansen, Ethnology division
My deepest gratitude goes to Aaron Glass, Assistant Professor of Native Peoples of the Northwest Coast, Museums and Anthropology, at the Bard Graduate Center, for his informative personal correspondence regarding In the Land of the Head-Hunters and the poster art associated with the film.
Read more about the complicated history of the Curtis film in: Holm, Bill and George I. Quimby. Edward S. Curtis in the Land of the War Canoes. UW Press 1980. See also: http://www.curtisfilm.rutgers.edu/
Whenever possible, I love to get out of my basement office and spend time in the Burke’s galleries. There are so many different things to see, and my curiosity still gets sparked from time to time. A couple of weeks ago, I was in the Burke lobby for our monthly Free First Thursday and talked with some of our docents about this interesting little creature.
This is a skull cast of Thrinaxodon liorhinus, a mammal-like reptile from the early Triassic (about 245 million years ago). Believed to be a “missing link” to mammals, this Therapsid was about the size of a cat. It was warm-blooded and had whiskers (if you look closely in the photo below, you can see holes in the skull where they would grow). Scientists also believe it had fur.
Although Thrinaxodons had mammal-like features and kind of resembles a beefed-up weasel, it also laid eggs and had scales.
So there you have it, another fascinating encounter with natural history. On the first Thursday of every month the Burke Museum is open until 8 pm and there are extra activities with Burke docents all day. If you come this Thursday, September 1st, you can see the Wolves and Wild Lands in the 21st Century exhibits before it closes on Labor Day, and perhaps you’ll have a Thrinaxodon moment too.
I was walking around the Burke’s exhibit galleries today (a great perk of working at the museum) and came across something that stopped me in my tracks: a teeny-tiny little bird’s nest.
This little hummingbird nest is quite a marvel of nature. Typically, female hummingbirds build the nest and raise their young on their own. There are usually two eggs laid in a hummingbird clutch—that’s a lot of family to fit in a nest that’s roughly the size of a chicken egg!
These creatures get even more interesting when you find out how these little nests are held together—spider webbing! Many species of hummingbirds collect spider webbing and use this to help “glue” the plant materials of the nest into a cohesive home. An added bonus to the spider webbing is that it holds lichen and moss to the outside of the nest—a perfect camouflage that blends nicely into trees and bushes where these nests are built.
Seeing this nest reminded me that it was time to clean out and restock my hummingbird feeder. If you give hummingbirds a backyard habitat with a feeder and hummingbird plants, you may end up with a nest like this! You can also see this exact nest in the “Explore Biodiversity” area in the Burke Museum’s Life and Times of Washington State exhibit.
Maybe I’m somewhat biased, but there are a lot of really cool things to see at the Burke Museum. Looking around at all of the amazing collections, you may wonder: how do these different things connect to each other? Well, that’s a complicated question, but being an avid organism-enthusiast, I can answer part of that question with another question: which of these organisms would eat each other?
In our Life and Times of Washington State exhibit, there are several fossils that when living would have found each other to be tasty treats. This early jawed fish preyed on trilobites and lamp shells.
Moving along several million years, the saber tooth cats of the last Ice Age, the geological time called the Pleistocene Epoch (2 million to 10,000 years ago), ate sloths.
These giant sloths were a formidable predator as well… to plants.
Fast-forward to today, and this beaver from the mammalogy collection likes to eat the bark of many different types of trees. Step outside the Burke on a nice day to check out the Erna Gunther Ethnobotanical Gardenand you’ll see the paper birch, a favorite meal of beavers.
So there you have it, a look at the Burke’s ecological buffet.
In this Collection Spotlight, we write less and hopefully you write more…
As I was happily clicking through the Ethnology Collections database, I came across this image of a doll titled Mourning Dancer by Yup’ik artist Suzanne Wardlow.
Here are some of my musings about this piece: I find this image entirely arresting. It makes me wonder about the sound the dancer would make as he moved. Having recently attended the Seattle Art Museum’s exuberant Nick Cave exhibit, I am interested in the contrast between the celebratory movement of Cave’s pieces and the mourning dance of Wardlow’s doll.
Now, what about you? When you first encounter an artifact in a museum, like this Mourning Doll, what musings do you have? Do you want to know how something moved, felt, tasted? When have you had to resist the urge to jump into an exhibit?
At this point, I have yet to master the art of mind reading (not for lack of trying, mind you)…so please WRITE me your musings and pondering in the comments…I'm curious to know what you think!
Each month the Burke Blog will introduce a new "-ology." The suffix -ology simply means "the study of ______." Hook up -ology with the scientific name of your area of interest and voilà, an -ology is born. For a complete list of -ologies ranging from acarology to zymology click here.
This month, I'd like to introduce you to one of my favorite -ologies: ICHTHYOLOGY. Contrary to its pronunciation, it is not the study of things that gross people out (unless fish fall into that category for you in which case you’re looking for ichthyophobia.) I digress.
Simple, right? In name yes, in scope no. Fish make up close to half of all vertebrate species in existence today. They can be found in salty, sandy, fresh, sewage-y, pristine and polluted waters from Antarctica to the Arctic. The classification, preservation and conservation of these creatures are a major concern for ichthyologists around the world. At the Burke Museum, ichthyologists use the enormous UW Fish Collection to add to our growing understanding of the amazing ecosystems here in the Northwest and beyond.
Ichthyology = the study of fish
I asked the Burke’s fish collection manager and professional ichthyologist, Katherine Maslenikov, to tell me a bit more about the fishes:
ES: What are some common misconceptions about ichthyologists?
KM: I guess most people assume that if you work on fish it is the commercial species, such as salmon. We spend most of our time in the Burke Fish Collection trying to educate people about the other 30,000 species of fishes in the world.
Katherine Maslenikov manages the Burke fish collection.
ES: Why should people care about ichthyology?
KM: There are more species of fishes than all other vertebrates combined. They are fascinating to study in terms of evolution and adaptation. Most people have some connection with fishes- whether it is to eat them in a restaurant, go catch them in the wild, or keep them in an aquarium. Fishes are valuable resources that need to be well managed and conserved.
ES: What is your favorite fish?
KM: There are so many fascinating fishes, but I guess my favorite would have to be the Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker (Eumicrotremus orbis).
Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker
ES: What's one small step we can take to assist your research or preserve/conserve fish diversity?
KM: Just be respectful of the resource: if you eat fish, don't take more than you need and try to only eat fishes caught in sustainable fisheries; if you keep fish in aquaria, make sure they are not rare or threatened and were raised in a sustainable way--not blasted out of a reef with dynamite. People often think the ocean is an endless resource, but we know this is clearly not the case. There are plenty of examples of fisheries crashing because we just took too many fish out of the populations. Treating the resources with respect will ensure that future generations can enjoy them as well.
ES: What is the most interesting research project to use the Fish Collection this year?
KM: One of our graduate students, Chris Kenaley, just finished up his Ph.D. on a group of deep-sea dragonfishes (family Stomiidae), showing the unique visual system using far-red light-producing cephalic photophores. Basically, there are many deep-sea animals that produce light (bioluminescence), butthese fishes have special organs on their heads that produce a red light, which is very different from other fishes. It enables them to sneak up on their prey using this light without being detected.\
Read more about the Burke Ichthyology department here.
Do you have a favorite fish story? Post it in the comments below!
Today is the first day of school at the University of Washington. Yesterday, to welcome students who are new to campus, the Burke Museum held the annual Chocolate Fair orientation event. About 900 UW students attended the Chocolate Fair and had the privilege of seeing special displays from the ethnology, archaeology, paleontology, genetic resources, mammalogy, fish, and spider collections. And of course, there was a chocolate fountain!
Fisheries
Ethnology
Fossil Prep
Mammalogy
It's good to have the campus buzzing with activity again!
The Leon Metcalf Collection of recordings at the Burke Museum is one of the new additions to the National Recording Registry. Each year 25 recordings (or collections of recordings) are selected by the Library of Congress to be added to a list of "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" recordings. This significant collection was made by Leon Metcalf between 1950-1954 and includes recordings of the First People of western Washington State and many other Native American and foreign languages.
In the early 1900s, Leon Metcalf dropped out of his Marysville, WA high school and began working in a logging camp. He had trouble in school due to a hearing disability and was assisted by a few Snohomish Indian loggers, who took him under their wing, advised him, and taught him some of their language and something about their culture. Thanks to the support he received, Leon returned to school and became a professor and a musician. Years later, Leon returned to Tulalip with a tape recorder to document what he believed was the dying Lushootseed language. (read more about Leon’s story here)
Lushootseed Alphabet. Courtesy of Juliet Shen.
Some of the recordings in the collection were made when he worked for Wycliffe Bible Translators while the Puget Sound recordings were made when he was a student of Mel Jacobs studying western Washington languages. Metcalf's goal in making the recordings was to aid tribal language programs. Among the many individuals he recorded were Ruth Shelton, Susie Sampson Peter, Annie Daniels, Martha Lamont, Willy Gus, Martin Sampson, Silas Heck, Harry Moses, Hal George, Amy Allen, and Joseph Hillaire.
The Metcalf recordings include unique content such as personal messages, conversations, and lengthy myth narratives that filled several reels of tape. The revival of interest in Lushootseed language through the work of Upper Skagit elder Vi Hilbert, owes much to this collection, which has been the source of material for language instruction projects and numerous publications since the 1970s.
The Leon Metcalf audio collection was donated to the Burke in 1970 and is housed in the Ethnology Archives. Thanks to their inclusion in the National Recording Registry, the Leon Metcalf collection of recordings will be even more available to interested individuals across the United States.
If you would like copies of these tapes, please contact Ethnology staff. A nominal cost is charged to make copies.
