Volume 4 / Issue 1

On the cover: Tripod pottery vessel of incised thin black ware from the painted tomb at Tikal. A long-legged bird stands on the lid.
What in the World
A Television Institution
By: George Dessart
In the realms with which Expedition is normally concerned, eleven years is not a long time. To the anthropologist, it is half a generation; to the archaeologist, it is scarcely a moment. But to a thirteen-year-old child, or to the television industry, eleven years is more than half a lifetime. To us in television, still struggling through what […]
Expedition News – Fall 1961
The Ain Shems Collection From 1928 to 1933, the late Dr. Elihu Grant, who was then Professor of Biblical Literature at Haverford College, conducted excavations for the College at Ain Shems in western Judaea. This is presumably the site of the Biblical Shemesh, scene of Samson’s exploits. There Dr. Grant found a classical succession of […]
Philippine Hats
On northern Luzon a man's suklang told his age, marital status, and village--and, sometimes, whether he was a successful head-hunter.
By: Ruth Linker
Sometime in the second decade of this century, the Misses Elizabeth H. and Sarah L. Metcalf made their way through Northern Luzon in the Philippine Islands picking up samples of the clothing, household possessions, weapons, and tools used by the native tribes. Among the headaxes, lime tubes, tobacco pipes, chicken baskets, and fish traps which […]
The Men Behind the Lore
By: MacEdward Leach
The folklorist is a prosaic character alongside an archaeologist or ethnologist. Even a handful of arrowheads is likely to arouse more interest than a broadside ballad. What can a folklorist offer to rival a lost Mayan city? The Grateful Dead story can be collected in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia in a detailed and […]
The Painted Tomb At Tikal
An important discovery by the Museum's expedition in Guatemala.
By: Edwin M. Shook and Alfred Kidder, II
One day, perhaps late in March of the year A.D. 457, masons set the final stone in the wall they had built to seal off the tomb of their late ruler. It was a strong wall of limestone blocks, set firmly in lime mortar. The masons, probably no more than two in the narrow space […]
Sea Routes to Polynesia
By: Thor Heyerdahl
Sea Routes to Polynesia was read by Mr. Heyerdahl at a dinner in honor of The Fellows of The University Museum in April of 1961. The article presents, in a very much shortened version, the major conclusions that he first discussed at length in his book American Indians in the Pacific. Here he adds some new […]
The Lords of the Maya Realm
By: Tatiana Proskouriakoff
We Mayanists spend an inordinate amount of time deciphering half obliterated hieroglyphic texts. Often it seems that our results are not worth all that efforts; but now and again some minor fact that hardly seems worth mentioning at the time can be used to pry open a chink in the wall of obscurity that surrounds […]
A Fiji-Iroquois War Club
An Unusual Case of Diffusion
By: Lee A. Parsons
The museum anthropologist occasionally has the unique opportunity of making inferences in regard to cultural process from the study of material culture alone. One such opportunity was afforded the author recently when dismantling a twenty-five year old exhibit of historic Iroquois materials at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Included in this assemblage of lacrosse sticks, baskets, […]