By 1894, with paleontology established, Jesup retired, and the new President, Frederic Ward Putnam, hired Franz Boas, to direct the anthropology program. A Jewish emigrant from Germany, sporting a dueling scar from his University days, Boas had contributed extensive data and collections to the Museum from the Northwest Coast Indians. This culture area was featured in the spectacular exhibit of a giant canoe with Indian paddlers in the Museum’s entry hall that attracted many visitors; alas, the paddlers have now been removed. Boas’s interest in detailed cultural descriptions of indigenous peoples who were thought to be rapidly disappearing, was a solid basis for field research and it led to the Museum’s most celebrated project, the Jesup Expedition.
At the center of Dr. Freed’s enthralling story of the hugely successful Siberian phase of the Jesup expedition are its three anthropologists, “the Russian troika … those Jewish tough guys” Lev Shternberg, Waldemar Jochelson and Waldemar Borogas. Imprisoned revolutionaries against the Tsar, all had been exiled to Siberia for ten year stretches. “With nothing to do in their desolate place[s],” each had studied the languages and cultures of various Siberian groups (including the outlawed Russian Skopcy sect whose practices included castration). While the men received payment from the AMNH, their wives, essential aids to the expedition, shared the hardships and deprivations of the men for free.
Dina Jochelson, herself a scholar and medical doctor, travelled to Jochelson’s fieldwork base in winter, sleeping on the ground in minus zero weather and subsisting on an allotment of 3 days’ rations for 9 days on a raft, just as her husband did. In their base camp, they shared a squalid yurt whose winter entrance was a hole in the roof to which they climbed up and then down through the chimney hole, where they were “smoked like herrings.” Dina took skull measurements from the recalcitrant tribes people, photographed the villages and acted as field secretary and medical officer in this “kingdom of endless ice and gloom, … a lonely abandoned grave of a place” where the ‘true inhabitants were bears, powerful winds, punishing hellish blizzards and destructive hurricanes.”
Sofia, Borogas’s wife, did not accompany her husband on his excruciatingly difficult field trips where the cold compelled him to write his notes in reindeer blood, keeping alive on raw meat and tea. She stayed alone for eight months in their isolated river village “where there were blizzards even in summer.” She not only collected texts, ethnographic data, artifacts, skulls and plaster casts, but carefully wrapped and packed for shipping more than 5000 of these items, with only a few local men to help.
Despite these, and many other hardships, the Jesup expedition was a “stunning success.” But although Boas was instrumental in its organization, he was, as Freed says, “his own worst enemy;” his many conflicts with Museum administrators and anthropological curators led to his resignation shortly thereafter. He was replaced as Director of the Anthropology Department by Clark Wissler, who took the Anthropology Department in a new direction. Wissler hoped to coordinate cultural anthropology and archaeology, designing major archaeological expeditions in the New World, all of which involved major difficulties. In Alaska, the anthropologist murdered an Eskimo; in lonely northern Mexico, the indigenous people thought the anthropologist “was crazy;” and in Central and South America, the anthropologists got lost, trekked hundreds of miles in unknown territory, sailed 1300 miles up the coast of South America, and drove a sail-powered Model T Ford through the Peruvian deserts.
Wissler hoped that these expeditions would reveal the “mystery” of the origin, migrations, chronology, and culture change among the diverse indigenous cultures in the New World, another question of great public and scientific interest. One side benefit of the archaeological expeditions to Pueblo Bonita, Aztec Ruin, Chaco Canyon and other ruins in the American Southwest, was the exposure of widespread unethical practices of selling Indian artifacts, which led to the passage of the Antiquities Act by President Theodore Roosevelt, and the subsequent designation of many of these ruins as National Monuments.
The South American expeditions were led by the last of the Victorian gentlemen scientist adventurers, who, as in the Jesup expedition, overcame obstacles and dangers with elan and ingenuity. One significant scientific result of these expeditions was the discovery by Junius Bird, a forerunner of Indiana Jones, of human remains at Fells Cave in Tierra del Fuego. These demonstrated human coexistence with extinct Pleistocene mammals at the tip of South America for 11,000 years. In addition to illuminating human migration in the New World, the archaeological expeditions also contributed collections of artifacts which added to the grandeur of the AMNH exhibit halls, such as the Mexican Hall, for which the Museum would become famous.
Dr. Freed ends his engaging history with anecdotes about Margaret Mead, to whom he gives due credit for her contributions to the Museum, in the Hall of Pacific peoples, for example, as well as to cultural anthropology, and the popular understanding of American culture. Indeed, he and his wife Ruth were at her hospital bedside just a few days before she died, discussing aspects of American culture — and aging. Freed also, with his characteristic integrity, unmasks the controversies Mead created by her positions on the Vietnam War, recalling the brouhaha Boas caused during WWI by castigating America’s entry into that conflict. And, in a perhaps too brief section, he notes the racism perpetuated by a Museum President, Henry Osborne, a great friend of Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race, a subject on which the Museum has completely changed its direction.
Freed’s book is a “must read” that will provoke his audience to revisit the Museum, follow up many of his sources, and visit the sites he writes about. A perfect graduation gift for a college student, we sum up by ending as we began, with the words of Holden Caulfield:
“The best thing, though, in that museum was that … you could go there a hundred times, and nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you ...”
*Professor Emeritus, Anthropology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY
** Professor Emeritus, Comparative Literature, New York City Technical College, CUNY
Illustration: Locations of exploring and field parties in 1913, American Museum of Natural History map. Photo: Primate skeleton from the Hall of Primates. Wikipedia
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