Henry Field (1902-1986)

Henry Field, physical anthropologist and archaeologist (and great nephew of department store founder and philanthropist Marshall Field -as in, the Field Museum of Natural History) was born in Chicago but grew up and was educated in England.

Henry’s mother, Minna Field, while still a student at the Misses Masters’ School in New York, had eloped with a Yalie with a million dollar inheritance. Her fortune was bigger. That marriage didn’t last long, but Minna would soon remarry, and she and her young son Henry relocated to her new husband’s estate in England, Baggrave.

Henry, who kept his mother’s maiden name, grew up amongst wealth and privilege. When not fox hunting and touring Europe, he became interested in archaeology and anthropology. For his twelfth birthday, he asked his parents to hire two laborers to dig up an ancient Saxon site on his family’s estate. The diggers uncovered a few artifacts, a hearth, and part of an old cobblestone pavement.

Field’s family connections in America and England provided him opportunities for travel and entry into elite circles. His Uncle Barbour arrange a meeting with Dr. Henry Wellcome, pharmaceutical company owner, philanthropist, and archaeologist, who told Field, “I can arrange for you to meet anyone in Europe, provided you have a question he alone can answer.” Then he added, “Go out and learn everything of something and something of everything.” (Field 1953:30)

In 1925, while still a student at Oxford, his Uncle Barbour sent him a gift of $1,000 and told Henry to go out and dig. Naturally, Field took one of his professors, physical anthropologist L.H. Dudley Buxton, and headed off to the Middle East over the Christmas Holiday. A visit to the Great Pyramids, dinner at Shepheard’s Hotel, and a train ride to the Valley of the Kings for a tour of the recently discovered tomb of King Tut from Howard Carter was just a prelude. In Jerusalem, Field and Buxton met up with Stephen Langdon for the long ride to the Mesopotamian site of Kish.

At Kish, they spent three weeks working at the dig, on the lookout for human skeletons to measure. While there, a report came in of an older site nearby. Field, Langdon, site director Mackay, and a driver hopped into their Model T Ford, and with four pickmen clinging to the running boards, drove out to conduct the first survey of the site that would become known as Jemdet Nasr.

No grand archaeological tour would be complete without a visit to see Leonard Woolley and his excavation at Ur, a meeting with Gertrude Bell in Baghdad, and a stop at the site of Babylon. After checking these off their list, Field also managed to wrangle permission to accompany a British Army patrol into the Falluja Desert. Travelling with two Rolls Royce armored cars, Buxton and Field were able to find stone flakes that proved that prehistoric peoples had once lived there.

Once back in England in early 1926, Field began planning his spring break, an Easter Holiday trip to Europe, where, with the Abbe Breuil and Dorothy Garrod, he toured Gibraltar and Spanish Paleolithic rockshelters and caves.

His actual graduation from Oxford in 1926 may have seemed somewhat anticlimactic, but, with a job as Assistant Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago awaiting him in the fall, Field made time for a grand tour of the museums of Germany and other European states over the summer.

Field’s scholarly interests were broad – he devoted much time, effort, and museum funds to both Europe and the Middle East, to Paleolithic archaeology and to the earliest civilizations, and to the physical anthropology of prehistoric and modern populations. During all his travels, he sought to take anthropometric measurements of local people, and to measure the skulls found in prehistoric and more recent burials.

Beginning in 1928 he returned to Iraq to work at Kish and Jemdet Nasr, but much of his time in the late 1920s and early 1930s was consumed by planning and executing two major new exhibits at the Field Museum, timed to coincide with the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933-1934.

The Hall of Prehistoric Man required many trips by Field to Europe to visit archaeological sites and museums, meet with archaeologists, and purchase artifacts. For the Hall of the Races of Mankind, he planned to have over 100 life-sized sculptures and busts, each depicting an example of a different “race” of humans. Sculptor Malvina Hoffman was selected for this daunting task.

In the 1940s, as America’s entry into World War II approached, President Franklin Roosevelt said to him “I need a tame anthropologist on my staff” and Henry Field began working for the White House. As Anthropologist to the President, he directed the production of research guides that taught soldiers how to behave while stationed in the exotic countries of the Middle East. His duties expanded to include research on shark repellent, survival kits (bibles and song books on waterproof paper were included in lifeboat supplies), signaling mirrors, rockets, and napalm. Later in the war, Field became the director of the top secret “M” project for the Special Intelligence Unit of the White House, tasked by President Roosevelt with researching potential resettlement areas for war refugees in North Africa and the Middle East.

After World War II, Field would hold several other positions, continue to travel, and participate in additional expeditions in the Middle East and Africa, before settling in at the University of Miami in 1966.

Selected References:

Field, Henry

1953 The Track of Man. Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York.

Heise, Kenan

1986 “Obituary: Memorial Service for Harry Field, World-renowned Explorer And Author” Chicago Tribune.

#archaeology #jazzage #physicalanthropology #museum #WWII #sculpture #jazzageadventurers

Revised from an earlier version

Out of a lonely and tragic childhood in Kentucky – His four younger siblings and his mother all died before he was ten years old, and his father died when he was fifteen – Charles Mitchell Smith forged a new identity and purpose for himself as a young adult, abandoning his job as a teacher (“the tedium and monotony of such a life did not appeal to him,” Fowke said of himself) for a life as an archaeologist, and abandoning, at the age of 31, his birth name for that of his ancestor, Gerard Fowke (a cavalry officer under King Charles II who left Britain for America after Cromwell’s victory in the English Civil War).

Fowkes was a rambler for science: his modus operandi was to walk, to observe, and to dig (“in no other direction could he find equal opportunity for indulging his love of outdoor life and his desire to mingle with people who differ widely in customs, tendencies and ideals” - Fowke, again, talking about himself in the third person). By the end of his career, he had walked over 100,000 miles through almost every state east of the Rockies, and several states and countries elsewhere.

He worked with Warren Moorehead, the Smithsonian Institution, and the American Museum of Natural History. His method consisted of walking river valleys from their headwaters to their outfall looking for archaeological sites. An account of his expeditions prior to the beginning of the Jazz Age is staggering:

• 1884 Flint Ridge, Ohio
• 1885 Mississippi, Tennessee, Ohio, Kentucky
• 1886 Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio
• 1887 Ohio, Michigan Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, New York (Niagara River gorge)
• 1888 Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky (Big Bone Lick)
• 1889 Ohio mounds excavations
• 1890 Virginia, Tennessee, New York, Indiana, Ohio
• 1891 Virginia (James River, Luray Valley, and Shenandoah River), West Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, Florida
• 1892 Columbia, South America, and the Savannah River in Kentucky, Alabama, and Tennessee
• 1893 New Jersey (studying the Trenton Gravels), Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio
• 1894, 1896, Massachusetts (studying alleged “Norsemen” sites)
• 1896-1898 Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada
• 1898 Siberia (canoeing, rather than walking, 700 miles of the Amur River with the Jesup North Pacific Expedition)
• 1902 Missouri (Kimmswick Mammoth/Mastodon site) and Kansas (“by means of tunnels and trenches disclosed the nature of the deposits in which was found the “Lansing Skull” 28 feet underground”)
• 1903 Missouri (caves and other sites)
• 1904 Curated the archaeological display of the St. Louis Exposition in Missouri
• 1905-1908 Missouri and Illinois
• 1909 A year of writing
• 1910 New York and Kentucky “doing literary work”
• 1911-1916 Missouri Historical Society (St. Louis area)
• 1912 Guatemala (Quirigua and other sites)
• 1914 Kansas, Nebraska
• 1917-1919 Missouri (Ozarks)

Early in his career, he became involved briefly with claims for alleged Norse archaeological sites around Cambridge, Massachusetts promoted primarily by Eben Horsford, a Harvard professor and baking powder entrepreneur. Fowke seems to have taken a moderate approach, primarily focusing on how the stone formations in Massachusetts were different from known prehistoric Native American sites.

By 1902, he had over 15 years of first-hand experience with archaeological sites throughout the eastern half of the United States, which meant he could see the big picture, and easily describe regional differences in prehistoric cultures:

The great enclosures commonly called “sacred” are found between central Ohio and central Kentucky, from the panhandle of West Virginia to the lower Wabash; the garden beds are confined to Michigan and northern Indiana; the effigy mounds principally in the adjoining portions of Iowa, northern Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota; the great hilltop fortifications in Ohio; the pyramidal flat-topped mounds in the southern States and as far up the two principal rivers as St. Louis and Evansville.(Fowke 1902:101)

That same year, he published one of his magnum opuses, the 760 page long Archaeological History of Ohio: The Mound Builders and Later Indians, published by the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society in 1902. This book demonstrated his wide ranging knowledge of the archaeological literature, including often lengthy quotes assembled from numerous earlier books, articles, and newspaper reports, to address two of the biggest issues of the time: Paleolithic Man and the Mound Builders. The reaction was immediate and often vituperous. One of the officials of the society that published it decried the book’s “lurid cast of sarcastic dogmatism.” (Randall 1902:160)

Why such a reaction? Because Fowke (correctly) rejected the concept of the Moundbuilders, an invented race of non-Native Americans who allegedly lived in America before the Indians and who built all the mounds and earthworks found throughout the Eastern and Midwestern United States. Fowke also called to task those people who believed, saying:

Most publications relating to the subject, whether newspaper articles or bulky volumes, are the work of relic hunters, or persons whose curiosity is excited by something they have seen or heard, or visionaries seeking proof of a pet hypothesis – and generally finding it; careless, unskilled, and superficial observers, whose acquaintance with the science is derived mainly or in some cases entirely at second-hand, and whose statements are unsafe to rely upon no matter how honest their intentions…. Almost invariably something is taken for granted ; partial examination of a limited field becomes the basis of arbitrary deductions respecting a wide range of country; hasty surmises appear in the form of definite assertions; indications and possibilities patched together with wild guesses, are recorded as established facts. (Fowke 1902:1)

This awareness, unfortunately, did not prevent Fowke from taking a pro-eugenics stance, in at least one paper he published in the late 1920s.

Fowke was not an ideologue –on the frankly confusing issue of alleged Paleolithic tools in the Trenton Gravels of New Jersey, he presents both sides of the argument. Although he appears to be inclined towards William Henry Holmes’ (correct) conclusion that the supposed Paleolithic hand axes are more recent preforms, he withheld final judgement. On the association of humans with extinct megafauna at Kimmswick, Missouri (over twenty years before the discovery of the Folsom site), he questioned the sketchy aspects of Koch’s account of mastodon and mammoth finds (i.e., that the Mastodon giganteus had been burned alive by people after getting stuck in the mud), but found the reported association of the bones with stone tools more convincing.

The 65 year old Fowke entered the Jazz Age by traveling to Hawaii in 1920, beginning his expedition by consulting the staff and collections of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, then venturing to the Island of Molokai, primarily because tourists didn’t go there.

He examined and often excavated fish ponds (stone walls in inlets), taro patches, villages, temples, paved trails and alleged “sacrifice stones.” There were also stone cairns, but “The natives vigorously protested against an attempt to excavate any of these, claiming that their ancestors or members of their families are buried in them and must not be disturbed. In the dunes human skeletons are frequently exposed by the shifting of the sands by the high wind. The natives seem to have little regard for these.” (Fowke 1922:178)

Returning to the mainland, he spent the next several years traversing landscapes both familiar and new, including a walk from Virginia north to Vermont in 1922, and a geology-focused excursion to Yellowstone, Utah and Colorado in 1923. Much of 1925 was spent in museum work in Washington D.C. He continued to travel the next several years, including a trip to excavate mounds at Marksville, Louisiana in 1926 and to Carlsbad Cavern in New Mexico in 1928.

Gerard Fowke died in 1933 in Indiana. After his death, it was written that he

delighted in exploration and up to the last year of his life was active in wresting from Nature her secrets. During his long life there were no lengthy periods of inactivity.

He was a man who loved and was much beloved by children. He spent many hours with small groups of his little friends, revealing to them the story of the rocks, the streams and the plants. (Hansford and Logan 1933:20)

Selected References:

Fowke, Gerard

1900 Points of Difference between Norse Remains and Indian Works Most Closely Resembling Them. American Anthropologist 2(3):550-562.

1902 Archaeological History of Ohio: The Mound Builders and Later Indians. Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, Press of Fred. J. Heer, Columbus, Ohio.

1922 Archeological Investigations I. Cave Explorations in the Ozark Region of Central Missouri, II. Cave Explorations in Other States, III. Explorations along the Missouri River Bluffs in Kansas and Nebraska, IV. Aboriginal House Mounds, V. Archeological Work in Hawaii. Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76.

1929 Gerard Fowke. Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 38(2):201-218.

Hansford, Hazel, and W.N. Logan

1933 Gerard Fowke (Charles Mitchell Smith). Proceedings of Indiana Academy of Science 43:20-23.

Randall, E.O.

1902 Archaelogical (sic) Agitation. Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 11(1):160-161

#archaeology #biography #Ohio #jazzageadventurers

Revised from an earlier version

The quintessential explorer, Roy Chapman Andrews organized and led multiple scientific expeditions tfor the American Museum of Natural History. Andrews was also a prolific author and celebrity – his character was tailor-made for the Jazz Age, which had “a taste for audacious ventures, a love of flamboyance and craving for excitement.” (Gallenkamp p. 300)

Andrews’ scientific field was mammalogy, but his greatest skill was as an expedition leader, assembling teams of scientists and leading them to remote locations where they could make great discoveries. Through negotiation, networking, bribes (“squeeze”), and occasional intimidation, Andrews managed to pull off five wildly successful scientific expeditions in China and Mongolia. His team, including lead paleontologist Walter Granger, discovered the first dinosaur eggs, the first Velociraptor fossil, and numerous other species of dinosaurs and extinct mammals spanning millions of years.

Born in Wisconsin in 1884, Andrews attended Beloit College and then traveled to New York City determined to work at the American Museum of Natural History. Working his way up through the ranks, he successfully completed several mammal collecting expeditions before conceiving of, raising funds for, and planning the logistics of the Central Asiatic Expedition. The main scientific focus would be on paleontology and early human ancestors. Beginning with the first field season in 1922, the paleontological discoveries were immediate and spectacular, but the search for early hominid fossils was unsuccessful.

Andrews and the other team members successfully dealt with sandstorms, extreme heat and cold, venomous snakes, bandits, and bureaucrats. Andrews also survived a serious wound after he accidentally shot himself in the leg.

When not actually on an expedition, Andrews preferred to spend most of his time living among other expatriates in Peking. In 1931, shut out by the political situation in China from doing more fieldwork, he would play polo during the day, and then work late into the night on his writing. Around 3:00 A.M., he would ring up fellow adventurers Sven Hedin and Davidson Black to go out to “cafés of somewhat dubious reputation to have scrambled eggs, dance with the Russian girls, and then go home to bed.” (Andrews in Gallenkamp p. 277). He eventually returned to the United States, was president of the Explorers Club for several years, and finally became the Director of the American Museum of Natural History. He retired in 1942 and wrote several more books before he passed away in 1960.

Reference: Gallenkamp, Charles 2001 Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic Expeditions. Viking Press.

Revised from a previous post.

#1920s #JazzAge #paleontology

A few years ago, I picked up a set of drinking glasses and matching ice bucket from an antique store down the shore.

This set was made by the Libbey Glass Company. Libbey was, and still is, one of the biggest manufacturers of drinking glasses, and it sold its most popular patterns were sold for decades, so it’s easy to find this pattern, Silver Foliage, on eBay, Etsy, and other sites, especially if you search for “vintage Midcentury Modern glasses.”

According to some internet sources, Silver Foliage was produced between 1957 and 1978. The Golden Foliage pattern was introduced the same year and produced through 1982 – so those vintage Midcentury Modern glasses on eBay could actually be from the Disco Era

.

Golden Foliage was so popular that other manufacturers copied the design on their own glasses (my set has Libbey’s cursive “L” maker’s mark on the bottom of each glass). Meanwhile, Libbey was busy putting the two foliage patterns on different styles (like the less pleasing bases on the ones above, probably from the 1970s) and types of glassware (check out the tray and carafe below).

These glasses combined style and practicality. They were affordable (about $4 to $8 for a set of 6 or 8 glasses in the 1960s) and durable, but also shapely and substantial – these tumblers feel good to hold. That is a testament to the skills of Freda Diamond, a prolific designer and consultant who began working for Libbey 1n 1942. The shape of the glasses is, as the MOMA has recognized, truly Classic (see below); the graphic designs on the glasses were not always so timeless (see also below).

Libbey’s history goes back over 200 years to the New England Glass Company, but in 2020 (when I acquired these vintage glasses), the company declared bankruptcy. They emerged as a privately held company. While the company survives, its workers have not fared as well.

Revised from a 2020 post.

#vintage #glassware #Libbey #mcm #cocktails #1960s #1970s

Friendship is one of many abandoned towns in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. It was founded around the 1860s as a cranberry farming town. Cranberry packing ended around 1960 or so, and at least some people were still living here into the 1970s. The cranberry bogs are still here.

Pictures are from a few years ago, right after a controlled burn by the New Jersey Forest Fire Service.

#PineBarrens #ghosttown #NewJersey #bogs Edited from a previous post

This museum in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is housed in a concrete castle designed by Henry Mercer, an early archaeologist, collector, and ceramicist. Mercer collected historic tools and other artifacts that demonstrated American industry and crafts, including blacksmithing, butchery, hat-making, and many more.

#ceramics #arttile #tile #Pennsylvania #history #craf

In 1922, artist Alice Lescinska Lowe Ferguson (1880-1951) and geologist Henry Gardiner Ferguson purchased a ramshackle and overgrown farm on the banks of the Potomac River in Maryland to use as a retreat from their Washington D.C. home.

At the farm, called Hard Bargain, they lived with a cast of characters out of a children’s book. There were cows Elizabeth and Jane, pigs Solomon and Fear Naught Matchless Lady, horses Prince and Bonnie Jean, and Pogie the bull, who liked to twirl a wheelbarrow on his head, then graduated to pushing farm vehicles down hills. Their dog, Caligula Sin Verguenza (“shameless Caligula”), lived up to his name, terrorizing many of the farm animals.

Local collectors had long known that arrowheads could be found in Hard Bargain’s fields. The Fergusons allowed them to continue to surface collect, and also picked up many artifacts themselves, so much that they eventually built a little shed to display all their finds.

“We thought it would be great fun to sit on a dump heap and watch somebody dig knowledge out of the ground,” but the professional archaeologists they tried to interest in their site were all busy working in more exotic, or at least far away, lands. One day, however, a “group of lads” snuck onto her land and dug a trench through her alfalfa field, absconding with their finds. On their way out, the teenagers used a rifle to take potshots at various mailboxes and other things that did not belong to them. The Fergusons (and their neighbors) were furious, but also intrigued. They and the “gang” (a mixed assortment of friends and acquaintances who came to the farm on weekends to drink, hang out, play volleyball, help with farm chores, and drink) began haphazardly digging for artifacts beneath the alfalfa.

“In those days I dug, too, but as time went on I spent more and more time sitting on the dump heaps, watching them burrow and getting a little morose about it all. The more they dug…the more convinced I was that the site was really important and not a proper plaything for anybody.”

In the decade or so since purchasing Hard Bargain, Alice Ferguson had continued to paint, designed and had built a new farmhouse and other farm buildings, oversaw the farm operations, and become an honorary firefighter in the village. Now, in her mid-fifties, she set out to learn how to be an archaeologist.

In the summer of 1935, six men were hired: three black men to remove the plow zone soils, and three white “intelligent lads of college age” to identify and excavate any features that were uncovered.

Over the next six years, Alice Ferguson supervised the excavation of what would become known as the Accokeek Site (18PR8). The size and scale of the excavation expanded greatly. Friends from the U.S. Geological Survey (where her husband worked) helped with laying out a grid and mapping the site. Additional diggers, many of them local high school boys, this time presumably without firearms, used shovels to remove the plowzone and reveal stockade lines, pits, and other features. These were excavated by hand and photographed. A series of ossuaries (burial pits where disarticulated human remains are reburied) containing the remains of almost 800 individuals were excavated, as were 39 dog burials. Over 150,000 artifacts were recovered, and the little log cabin museum on the farm expanded to five buildings.

As the finds piled up, many professional archaeologists and other scientists (several associated with the nearby Smithsonian) provided guidance or visited the site, including Aleš Hrdlička, T. Dale Stewart, William Ritchie, Donald Cadzow, Henry Bascom Collins, Jr., James Griffin, John Hack, and Charles O. Turbyfill.

The largest locus at Accokeek contained two separate prehistoric stockaded villages. While the older component dates to the Early-Middle Woodland period, Ferguson identified the more recent occupation as Moyaone (pronounced Moy-OWN), a Piscataway village that John Smith had visited in AD 1608. This occupation, however, contained no European artifacts and is now thought to date no later than about AD 1550, so is unlikely to be the historically known Moyaone.

The advent of World War II essentially brought an end to her archaeological fieldwork as she focused on actual farmwork. With the war’s end, Alice Ferguson looked to write up her report on Moyaone, but as her health deteriorated, she was unable to finish the necessary revisions. Alice Ferguson passed away in 1951.

Alice and Henry Fergusons’ “combination of wealth, social standing, generosity, sincerity, unconventionality, intelligence and glamour left a lasting impression” (Sams 2015) on their friends, colleagues, the rural Maryland landscape, and on Mid-Atlantic archaeology. Money from her will was used to create the Alice Ferguson Foundation and to fund a fellowship awarded to Robert L. Stephenson, who completed the artifact analysis (“counting and classifying innumerable strawberry boxes of uninspiring potsherds,” according to Charles McNutt [1995:77]), which was published in 1963 (Stephenson and Ferguson 1963). 

Several new ceramic ware types defined from the site, including Mockley, Pope’s Creek, Accokeek, Potomac Creek, and Moyaone, were important in developing a ceramic chronology in the Mid Atlantic. The ceramic typology developed by Stephenson, although modified by more recent research, is still used today.

The Accokeek Site was later listed as a National Historical Landmark and part of Ferguson’s farm was donated to the National Park Service to form Piscataway National Park. The Park is across the Potomac River from George Washington’s home and serves to protect Mount Vernon’s viewshed from modern development. The Alice Ferguson Foundation and Hard Bargain Farm are still in existence.

Quotes from Alice Ferguson are taken from her 1941 memoir, Adventures in Southern Maryland.

References:

McNutt, Charles H. 1995 Robert L. Stephenson: The Plains Years. Plains Anthropologist 40(151):77-80.

Sams, Daniel 2015 Wagner House. Maryland Historical Trust, Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties Form Inventory No. PG:83-32.

Stephenson, Robert L., and Alice L.L. Ferguson, with sections by Henry G. Ferguson 1963 The Accokeek Creek site; a middle Atlantic seaboard culture sequence. Anthropological Papers, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, No. 20.

Revised from a previous post.

Southern Comfort, the whiskey+fruit n’ spices liqueur (I guess?), produced these pamphlets that you could find in your favorite magazine from the 1950s on. This one is probably from the early 1960s and everyone looks like they’re having a grand time.

You may not be a SoCo fan, but it’s more tasteful than these toasts.

#cocktails #1960s