Events Museum exhibits • Tours • Festivals • Meetings • Education • Conferences
Michael Hampshire
Natural History Museum of Utah
v NEW EXHIBITS
Anasazi Heritage Center
Museum of Indian Arts and Culture
Natural History Museum of Utah University of Utah, Salt Lake City—The new Rio Tinto Center houses the Natural History Museum of Utah, a 163,000-square-foot building with 10 galleries located above the shoreline of ancient Lake Bonneville. The re-envisioned museum presents a fascinating journey through the natural formation of life and land around Salt Lake City and throughout the state of Utah. The new exhibit “First Peoples” tells the story of the Great Basin’s prehistoric peoples while putting visitors in the shoes of archaeologists who use science to interpret the past. Explore Median Village, a reconstruction of an actual archaeological site excavated in the 1960s in Sevier County, and stop in the Dry Caves Learning Lab to understand why Utah’s archaeological preservation is so good. Designed in consultation with Utah’s native community, the exhibition “Native Voices” features the traditions of Utah’s five native nations—the Shoshone, Goshute, Paiute, Ute, and Navajo. (801) 581-4303, www.nhmu.utah.edu (New museum)
Dolores, Colo.—More than 40,000 people lived in the Hohokam region in a.d. 1300, but only two centuries later fewer than 10,000 were present. The new exhibit “Pieces of the Puzzle: New Perspectives on the Hohokam” explores this mystery using newly-developed methods and techniques that are revealing environmental and social stresses that led to the depopulation of southern Arizona during the 14th and 15th centuries. Recent discoveries about trade and immigration link Four Corners people of the Colorado Plateau to the Hohokam culture of southern Arizona. The exhibit is on loan from Archaeology Southwest, with artifacts from the Pueblo Grande Museum and Arizona State Museum. (970) 882-5600, www.blm.gov/co/st/en/fo/ahc.html (Through October 2012)
Museum of Indian Arts and Culture Santa Fe, N.M.—A major exhibit of North American Indian baskets, “Woven Identities” features 241 baskets made by artists representing 60 cultural groups from six culture areas of Western North America: The Southwest, Great Basin, Plateau, California, Northwest Coast, and the Arctic. Among the baskets on view are examples of false embroidery, cross weave, plaited, and coiled baskets that incorporate materials like wrapped twine, corn husk, roots, rhizomes, stems, branches, leaves, grass, and cedar bark. (505) 476-1250, www.miaclab.org/current (New long-term exhibit)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art Los Angeles, Calif.—“Children of the Plumed Serpent” illuminates the social and cultural complexities of late pre-Columbian and early colonial eras as expressed in the art of the period, and examines the enduring nature of these complexities in contemporary Mesoamerican societies. Recent scholarship demonstrates that a confederacy of city-states in southern Mexico successfully resisted both Aztec and Spanish subjugation. Calling themselves the “Children of the Plumed Serpent,” because of their belief that Quetzalcoatl, the human incarnation of the Plumed Serpent, had founded their royal lineages, this ruling class of nobles, called caciques, resurrected themselves and continued to affect cultural development in Mesoamerica during a dramatic period of social transformation. The exhibition explores the extraordinary wonders in fresco, codices, polychrome ceramics, gold, turquoise, shell, textiles, and other materials that were produced between a.d. 1200 and 1500 by these confederacies, whose influence spread throughout Mesoamerica by means of vast networks of trade and exchange. (323) 857-6000, www.lacma.org/art/exhibition (April 1-July 1, 2012)
american archaeology
5
