This issue of Expedition focuses on five very different kinds of fieldwork projects. All are connected in one way or another with The University Museum and its research staff, its archives, or its collections. In the first article, Barbara Roll Dells the story of the long-term relationship between the people of a New Guinea village and anthropologist Margaret Mead, who first worked among them in 1928, and of her own continuing role in helping Pere Village remember its past and prepare for the future. In the next article, Kris Hardin presents three different commentaries on a set of ethnographic photographs taken in the course of her fieldwork in Sierra Leone. With three such different responses, she asks, whose view “counts”? They all do, she answers, and acknowledging the validity of multiple voices can help us understand the biases inherent in any process of interpretation. Next. Eleanor King introduces us to “the wilder side of anthropological fieldwork” in the lowlands of Brazil in the early 1930s, where a young graduate student found himself expected to carry out his first archaeological and ethnographic research under unusually “colorful” circumstances. The excerpt from Uni, Vincenzo Peirullo’s unpublished manuscript, is a sensitive and evocative account of his experience among the Yawalapiti.
The last two articles feature two archaeological projects in which the conservation of Maya cultural heritage is at the fore. The first describes the production and transport of fiberglass replicas of two Maya monuments in The University Museum’s collections to the site of Caracol, Belize. La Rota Maya Conservation Foundation, who directed the project, is dedicated to preserving the cultural and environmental resources of the lands of the ancient Maya. In the second, Loa Traxler recounts the recent discovery of a noble—perhaps a royal—tomb at the Maya site of Copan. Copan is renowned not only for dramatic discoveries such as this one, but also for field techniques that allow the excavation and recording of subsurface features while leaving surface structures intact.
Lee Horne
Editor
