Recently, the Burke opened a new exhibit, “Imagine That”(http://www.burkemuseum.org/imagine). It shows off the collections and turns a public eye into the deepest recesses of the Museum. It’s not just the Burke Museum that’s doing this, though—American museums as a whole are starting to turn themselves “inside out”, for a number of reasons, including:

– to increase relevance of collections process for visitors and supporters,

– to help museumgoers learn about how science works,

– in some cases, to engage the public in a dialogue about the museum itself.

This past week, I had the good fortune to attend the American Alliance of Museums conference in our fair city, and there’s been a definite shift in how professionals approach the museum.The current view of many museum professionals is summed up by Kathleen McLean, who argues that museums should be good neighbors in the communities in which they operate. Museums have to find out what their community wants: they should ride the bus, hold potlucks at the museum, coordinate with groups in the surrounding area. “Why can’t a museum be like a coffee shop?” McLean asks, and why can’t a museum offer up its spaces as community gathering points?

Not only is this topic relevant to museum-marauding archaeologists, I think it’s interesting how analogous this discussion is to the one that is currently happening in archaeology. How do we open  archaeology up to a variety of ways of knowing? How do we crack open these hallowed spaces? How do we fight against (or work with) those academics and museum professionals who would prefer to maintain their distance from a world full of different ways to know?

I’m interested in hearing about what people think caused this sea change in the way we think about museums and social sciences.

[I may not be able to participate in the discussion for a while, but I’d still like to know!]

Being most of the way through this course, you might not be be surprised at how much peer-reviewed ink (print or otherwise) is spilled about the presence of archaeologists on the Internet. We’re talking blogs, outreach websites, hinky little geocities pages that are somehow still up—all these are contact points between archaeologists and “the public”. This boundary is porous, of course, but still very real.

This body of literature also asks: how have the Internet and the World Wide Web have changed how archaeologist communicate amongst each other? The answer is, a lot.

The front page. It’s kinda like Facebook, but exclusively dead animal lovers.

One such converging point is ZooBook (http://zooarchaeology.ning.com/). Not the sweet-ass magazines you pored over in kindergarten that were aggressively marketed to you, but a mega-listserv, an entire site dedicated to zooarchaeologists sharing information, articles, and tips.  Identifying bones, osseous pathologies, and a host of modifications are also covered. Groups and forum posts cover ancient instances of domestication, to the very recent historic period.

I know some of y’all are interested in zooarch, or at least plied your way through that class’ tough waters. These new lines of communication effectively allow you to eavesdrop on (and get into) professional conversation. Get a look at how to collaborate with other specialists over the Internet!

The community requires membership—if you’re interested in obtaining one, you can send me a message or e-mail invite@animalbones.org.

Reading over Deetz’s work again, I was struck by how similar their suppositions are to the likes of this fascinating little tome, written in 1977: A Pattern Language. 

The Beer Hall, #90 of 93 patterns enumerated of a Town. (Image credit: http://www.cesar.ws/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/5a.jpg)

A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander, et al. is an effort to catalog the architecture of Western human lives. It Identifies 253 patterns which can be combined in a variety of ways to create pleasing homes, towns, and worlds.

The book is divided into three sections; a pattern is appropriate for either Town, Building or Construction. The patterns are grouped into as conceptual nodes. The patterns in these nodes interrelate and are interdependent.

Here is an example from the introduction, which lists several pattern clusters appropriate for a Building:

From A Pattern Language p. xxvii

Strung together, the implementation of these patterns form a spatial sentence. The space is afforded a coherence–a way to communicate welcome.

A Pattern Language is more than woo-woo 1970’s social engineering through Western architectural rulebook; using these classifications as scaffolding, the book bestows grammar and syntax onto something as abstract as space. While Deetz uses architectural patterns to draw conclusions about how people lived in the past, Christopher Alexander and co. lists these patterns to suggest ways for individuals and groups to live in the future.

Interestingly, the authors assert that these patterns are “timeless” (the first book in the series is actually called A Timeless Way of Building). While these patterns are definitely not universal (there’s a little too much talk about chairs and parking for that to be true), it’s worth interrogating whether all of these patterns necessarily result in pleasing public and private spaces, even when we limit our vantage to a Western context.

The entirety of the book is available here:

http://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Ecological_Building/A_Pattern_Language.pdf

It’s worth at least a skim; it’s also good for decorating tips–because who doesn’t admire pattern #204, A Secret Space, or pattern #247, Paving With Cracks Between the Stones?

You’ve seen it, I’ve seen it, it’s shown in glass cabinets, hidden under sauces, or buried in the dirt of historical sites.

A classic platter in willow pattern (Image source: http://civilwartalk.com/threads/blue-willow-china.91070/)

It’s got a pagoda, a fence, some pastorality, a boat. It’s a game of telephone played with pictures across a few centuries. You’d better believe it, it’s the Willow Pattern, and it is one of the most-seen images of the past few hundred years.

You might not’ve ever thought about it before. You might have never looked too closely at your grandmother’s plate collection, and their subtle variety. You might have even assumed that this famed icon of china was from, oh, I don’t know… China.

A set of willow pattern ceramics. Image source: http://civilwartalk.com/threads/blue-willow-china.91070/

Nope. It’s unknown who designed the Willow Pattern, but it’s a toss-up between two English dudes from the late 1700s. If anything, the pattern’s an icon of Orientalism: wanna-be aesthetics on wanna-be porcelain.

It was even marketed with a wanna-be legend–two youngin’s in love, an accountant and a Mandarin’s daughter, who run away to be together and are ultimately murdered by the megalomaniacal Mandarin. The gods take pity, and transmogrify their corpses into birds (the story can be found in the form of a delightfully lulling tune by Momus). Yep–those two gallivanting doves you stared down during all those dull family meals–they’re lusty dead youth, transmogrified.