By: Alison Miner

It’s great when you find something that is beautiful and also conveys a great amount of information.
This is not one of those circumstances.
Pure 19th-century eye candy.

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By: Alison Miner

Ok, I’ll be honest. At first I just chose this image of an Aramaic incantation bowl as the fun friday image of the week because: “look! cute child-like monster drawings!”. But the more I learn about this esoteric corner of the archaeological world, the more relevant these little bowls become. For several hundred years between […]

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By: Alison Miner

Earlier this week I spent some time working on the collections of Linton Satterthwaite relating to the archaeological investigations in Caracol, Belize. The expeditions, in 1951 and 1953, were primarily focused on the salvage and documentation of stelae, the large carved monuments erected by the ancient Maya to commemorate rulers or historic events. They recovered […]

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By: Alison Miner

Given this rhetoric, and the colonial relationship between the Japanese government and the Ainu peoples, it is not surprising that their culture was not well studied for many years. In 1900, however, a traveler from Philadelphia, Hiram Hiller, took a detour from his pan-Asian journeys to visit Hokkaido. He met Jenichiro Oyabe, a Japanese man who was educated as a missionary, but who became a self-trained ethnographer of the Ainu people.

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By: Alison Miner

While this appears to be a picture of a visiting muppet, in actuality it is a Cherokee man, wearing a mask for the ceremonial Booger Dance.

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