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Pounders and quern

Submitted by Paolo on January 30, 2013 - 11:29am

Before their visit to the town of Meroë, the African Expedition stopped to a less known locality, which was recorded by Henry Field with this paragraph in the 1949 Chronicles:

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Potsherd

Submitted by Paolo on January 13, 2013 - 8:50pm
The ancient town of Meroë, in Sudan, had already been excavated for about thirty-five years when the University of California African Expedition was leaving Egypt and moving south through Sudan. In his 1949 chronicles, the anthropologist Henry Field wrote:
during a brief stop at Meroë, we took some photographs and collected a series of sherds.
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Chopper

Submitted by Paolo on November 16, 2012 - 10:58am
The Department of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley was established in 1901. In the words of Frederick W. Putnam the department and the museum were necessary to properly organize several archaeological and ethnological expeditions maintained on behalf of the University by Mrs. Phoebe A. Hearst.
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Sharp knife

Submitted by Paolo on October 31, 2012 - 9:08pm

In a past episode, the radio show This American Life recalled the story of the Georgia Rambler, a 1970s reporter who would travel to small towns across the state searching for regular folks with interesting stories to publish in the Atlanta Journal. A similar project was carried out in the mid 1940s by Lena Creswell, a retired physician from San Diego, California who traveled the United States as a freelance writer.

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Boat

Submitted by Paolo on September 28, 2012 - 7:57pm
To complement the Egyptian collections acquired by George Reisner under the patronage of Phoebe Hearst, the museum accessioned a number of objects from other sources and donors throughout its history. Some of them later turned out to be modern or contemporary reproductions of archaeological pieces. In other words: fakes.
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Figurines

Submitted by Paolo on August 31, 2012 - 9:00pm
These clay figurines are from Karkarinchinkat Nord, a neolithic site in the Tilemsi Valley, Republic of Mali. They were excavated in 1972 by Dr. Andrew Smith as part of his doctoral dissertation. A radiocarbon date indicated that they were buried between 2000 and 1360 B.C.
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Frog

Submitted by Paolo on August 14, 2012 - 4:56pm
Some time ago the museum had to move a substantial portion of the collections out of one storage area that was sold by the University. One of the last pieces moved was a 39.1ft. (11.9 m.) totem pole from British Columbia. The totem was originally erected around 1870 for a Haida man named Haostis and his wife K'awa; it was brought to the museum in 1911. During the moving process the totem was temporarily unwrapped and almost fully visible for the first time in 36 years; since it was removed from the museum's patio in 1974.
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Points

Submitted by Paolo on August 8, 2012 - 6:32pm

One of the largest accession of Old World archaeology at the PAHMA includes the assemblages collected during the University of California African Expeditions in 1947 and 1948. The availability of these collections for teaching and scholarly research raised an interest that, within few years, contributed to turn the Berkeley campus as one of the world's most active center for African prehistory.

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Sickle

Submitted by Paolo on July 24, 2012 - 7:49pm
Harvard graduate George A. Reisner received funding from Phoebe Hearst in 1898 for five years of research in Egypt. By the end of 1901 he had excavated parts of two large pre-dynastic necropoli at Ballas and El Ahaiwah and the more recent cemetery at Naga ed-Der. In addition he excavated portions of the large town of Der el-Ballas with palaces and commoner houses that he dated to the middle and new kingdoms although new excavations in the 1980s revealed earlier levels.
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Core

Submitted by Paolo on June 29, 2012 - 3:18pm

After serving as curator and director of the National Museum of Zambia (1938-1961), J. Desmond Clark came to UC Berkeley in 1961 and for almost thirty years he trained students in anthropology and Old World prehistory.

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