Robert Goldwater Library blog

Reconstruction of Obelisk of Axum Begins

via BBC News, June 6, 2008

Ethiopia starts restoring obelisk 

Work has begun to restore a historic obelisk in Ethiopia's ancient city of Axum, after it was returned from Italy.

The Axum Obelisk, a symbol of Ethiopia’s identity, was looted by troops in 1937 during Italy's brief occupation of Abyssinia.

Italy returned the 1,700-year-old monument in 2005, after decades of negotiations between the two countries.

The obelisk, which weighs more than 150 tonnes, had to be cut up into three pieces to be taken to Ethiopia.

The officer in charge of its restoration says the process of assembling the giant monument is slow and complicated.

"This strong granite monolith has suffered a lot of trauma in its life and it is not in very good shape so assembling it is a very delicate and complex operation," Nada al-Hassan told the BBC.

"We had to invent a way to assemble the pieces without harming them and respecting the delicate historic artefacts we are dealing with," she said.

The obelisk has weathered years of damage from pollution and a lightning strike in 2002.

The process of reconstruction is being overseen by the UN cultural agency, Unesco.

In 1947, Italy signed a pledge to the UN to give back the obelisk - seized by troops under Italy's fascist leader Benito Mussolini - but did not return it until 2005.

Malian manuscripts digitized

Excerpted and reblogged from the New York Times, published May 20, 2008:

Project Digitizes Works from the Golden Age of Timbuktu
by John Noble Wilford

< A legal opinion on the rules for buying and selling goods. (Credit: Savama-DCI)

From Timbuktu to here, to reverse the expression, the written words of the legendary African oasis are being delivered by electronic caravan. A lode of books and manuscripts, some only recently rescued from decay, is being digitized for the Internet and distributed to scholars worldwide ...

Now, the first five of the rare manuscripts from private libraries have been digitized and made available online (www.aluka.org) to scholars and students. At least 300 are expected to be available online by the end of the year.

Read full article

Four Maya sites featured on new web site

Originally spotted on ARLiSNAP:

An visually exciting and comprehensive web site on four Maya archaeological sites has just been posted by Charles Rhyne, professor emeritus of art history, and his colleagues at Reed College. [Kudos to Prof. Rhyne, who was my academic advisor at Reed.]

Architecture, Restoration and Imaging of the Maya Cities of Uxmal, Kabah, Sayil and Labná "includes over 1000 photographs ... taken on site, with descriptive captions, including architectural and sculptural details, paint remains, and interior spaces, not previously published. In addition, there are over 250 19th century drawings, prints and photographs and another 300 by early 20th century scholars, many previously unpublished, showing the appearance of these four cities before the extensive restoration campaigns of the twentieth century." While the site was produced by Reed College primarily for the use of its faculty and students, the site will certainly be of interest to a wider audience of specialists and non-specialists alike.

Of particular note to the library research-minded are the extensive scans culled from published works including Waldeck's Voyage pittoresque et archéologique dan la province d'Yucatan (1838), the several works by Stephens and Catherwood from the 1840s, as well as Charnay's Cités et Ruines Américaines (1862-63) and Anciennes  Villes du Nouveau Monde (1885), photographs by Le Plongeon, and Seler's monograph on the ruins at Uxmal.

An extensive bibliography is included, sorted into four separate pdf files by subject, author, title and date.

Yale and Machu Picchu: the never-ending story

Eliane Karp-Toledo, former first lady of Peru and currently a visiting lecturer at Stanford University, contributes an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times. In it she questions Yale University's commitment to the 'memorandum of understanding' signed by the government of Peru and the university to repatriate archaeological objects from Machu Picchu collected by Hiram Bingham III (Yale '98) and housed at Yale. Her objection hinges on Yale's request to retain some artifacts for 99 years for research purposes.

Karp-Toledo's objection to the memorandum has been previously noted, in Yale Daily News, as early as last September.

• You can read a nice running commentary on the negotiations here.
• Read our previous post (Aug. 2007) on the agreement.

Symposium examines human remains in museums

This weekend the Musée du quai Branly hosts a two-day symposium entitled Des collections anatomqiues aux objets de culte: conservation et exposition des restes humains dans les musées (or, "From Human Remains to Cult Objects: Conservation and Display of Human Remains in Museums"). The symposium, which is open to the public, will be held February 22 and 23 in the Théâtre Claude Levi-Strauss at the Musée.

Each of the four round tables will cover a different aspect of the problem (titles loosely translated from the French):

• Repatriating human remains: Why, for whom, under what conditions?
• Do human remains have a place in museums today?
• The status of human remains from the legal, ethical and philosophical points of view
• How to get along? Institutional mediation

A fuller description (pdf) is also available online.

Aluka 2.0

via Aluka Blog:

Flickr, Facebook, and 2.0: Aluka Takes the Plunge
November 29th, 2007 by Michael Gallagher, User Support

Aluka now has a presence on both Flickr and Facebook!

Aluka has uploaded images to Flickr from both the African Plants, Cultural Heritage and Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa content areas. From African Plants, we have a collection of specimens, drawings, and photographs that will be sure to entice any botanist or lover of plants.

For Cultural Heritage, we have amazing images taken by Dr. Heinz Ruther from such World Heritage Sites as Lalibela, Kilwa Kisiwani, Elmina Castle, Great Zimbabwe, and Timbuktu. The image included in this post is Bet Giorgis at Lalibela.

For Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa, we have  covers from some important texts from and about the countries in the region, including Angola, Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa.

Come and take a look; feel free to add us as a Contact as well so we can build a network! To view Aluka’s Flickr slideshow, simply go to http://flickr.com/photos/15721258@N06/.

On Facebook (www.facebook.com), we have created a group called Aluka (catchy, isn't it?). To join our group, search in Facebook for Aluka and click Join Group. We have information about Aluka, contact information, and some representative images from the digital library. Please come and join, ask a few questions, maybe even make some comments; it goes a long way towards developing the Aluka community!

West African 'sacrificial materials' analyzed

Reblogged from the NY Times:

December 4, 2007
Observatory
Ceremonial Objects From West Africa With Blood in the Patina
By HENRY FOUNTAIN

PHOTO CREDIT: Musée du quai Branly
An object collected from what is now Mali has blood in its coating.

Certain ceremonial objects from the Dogon and other cultures of West Africa are known for their dark patina. There is plenty of ethnological evidence that the thick coating on these wood sculptures, which are often in human or animal shapes, contains blood from animals sacrificed as part of the ceremonies. But the presence of blood had not been proved through chemical analysis.

Now Vincent Mazel and Pascale Richardin of the Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France and colleagues have done just that, finding blood on seven of eight Dogon and Bambara objects from Mali, all dating from the late 19th or early 20th centuries, except for one that is at least 500 years older. Their findings are published in the journal Analytical Chemistry.

The researchers used several precision analytical techniques, including time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry. That method separates ions by giving them all the same kinetic energy, so that their velocity, and thus their time to a detector, varies according to their mass.

Using tiny amounts of the patina from the objects, all of which are from the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, the researchers first demonstrated that they contained proteins. A major component of blood, after all, is the protein hemoglobin.

Then they showed that some samples contained heme, the iron-containing molecule that is bound to hemoglobin. In a few samples, heme was not present, although iron was.

So the researchers used X-ray scanning techniques to show that in all but one of these samples, the iron was associated with the proteins, indicating simply that the heme had degraded over time.