Publications

2024
Manifest: Thirteen Colonies
Wendel White. 2024. Manifest: Thirteen Colonies, Pp. 298. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Radius Books and Peabody Museum Press. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

Manifest | Thirteen Colonies is a photographic project and journey through the repositories of African American material culture found in libraries, museums, and archives of the original thirteen English colonies and Washington, DC. Conceived by photographer Wendel A. White, this project is a personal reliquary of the remarkable evidence of Black agency and racial oppression stored in public collections. Accompanying his imagery, White discusses his approach to finding, selecting, and photographing artifacts—from rare singular objects to more quotidian materials—and highlights their significance as forensic evidence of Black life and history in the United States. 

Manifest: Thirteen Colonies will be open to the public at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University from May 18, 2024-April 13, 2025.

Wendel A. White (b. 1956, Newark, NJ) is currently Distinguished Professor of Art at Stockton University and has taught photography at the School of Visual Arts; The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art; the International Center of Photography; and the Rochester Institute of Technology. His work has received various awards and fellowships, including: Doctor of Arts (hc), Oakland University; Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography; Bunn Lectureship in Photography, Bradley University; three artist fellowships from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; and New Works Photography Fellowship from En Foco Inc. His work is represented in museum and corporate collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; among many others.


 
2023
Community Fire
Zhang Xiao. 8/8/2023. Community Fire, Pp. 192. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press and Aperture. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract
In his project Community Fire, the photographer Zhang Xiao takes a local, hometown look at Shehuo (社火), a Chinese Spring Festival tradition celebrated in rural northern Chinese communities, including temple fairs, dragon dances, and storytelling. Shehuo—literally, “community fire”—is devoted to the worship of land and fire, and boasts a history of many thousands of years. During the festival, people hold ceremonies, pray for the next year’s good harvest, and confer blessings of peace and safety for all family members. 

However, what was once a heterogeneous cultural tradition with myriad regional variations has largely become a tourist-facing, consumption-oriented enterprise. In the early 2000s, Shehuo received an “intangible cultural heritage” designation from the People’s Republic of China, resulting in increased funding in exchange for greater government involvement. While transforming the practitioners’ relation to Shehuo, this change expresses itself most visually in the way Qing dynasty–era costumes and props have been replaced with newer, cheaper products from online shopping websites. Zhang’s photographs capture how these mass-produced substitutions have transformed the practice of Shehuo. Through a colorful and fantastical blend of portraiture and ephemera that documents the blurred edges between the everyday and the absurd, Community Fire is a dynamic visual exploration of one of China’s oldest traditions. 

Copublished by Aperture and Peabody Museum Press
Zuni, Hopi, Copan: Early Anthropology at Harvard, 1890–1893
John Gundy Owens. 4/18/2023. Zuni, Hopi, Copan: Early Anthropology at Harvard, 1890–1893. Edited by Curtis M Hinsley, Pp. 360. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press and Dumbarton Oaks Publications. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

Zuni, Hopi, Copan: Early Anthropology at Harvard, 1890–1893 publishes one hundred letters from John Gundy Owens to Deborah Harker Stratton, currently held in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Owens was one of the first graduate students in anthropology at Harvard; his poignant letters to “Miss Debbie” trace a budding relationship of affection in late Victorian America and offer vivid, highly entertaining accounts of his fieldwork at Zuni pueblo in New Mexico, Hopi mesa villages in Arizona, and the Maya site of Copan in Honduras.

Tragically, Owens died at age twenty-seven in Copan; Stratton never married and kept the letters until her own death, nearly fifty years later. Introductory essays by Curtis M. HinsleyLouis A. Hieb, and Barbara W. Fash contextualize the annotated letters and shed new light on early anthropological training in the United States.

2022
Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 3: Part 4: Yaxchilan
Barbara W. Fash, Alexandre Tokovinine, and Ian Graham. 12/6/2022. Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 3: Part 4: Yaxchilan. Edited by Barbara W. Fash, Pp. 108. Cambridge, Massachusetts : Peabody Museum Press and Dumbarton Oaks Publications. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

The goal of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions is to document in photographs and detailed line drawings all known Maya inscriptions and their associated figurative art. As monuments continue to be discovered, the CMHI series is ongoing and far from complete. It has been instrumental in the remarkable success of the ongoing process of deciphering Maya writing, making available hundreds of texts to epigraphers working around the world, in addition to assisting studies among Maya communities and scholars.

This folio-sized volume documents thirty stelae at Yaxchilan, a Classic Maya city located on the Usumacinta River in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. Precisely rendered line drawings and three-dimensional scans bring out details of the monuments that would otherwise be invisible to the naked eye. These illustrations are accompanied by descriptions of the stelae in English and Spanish.

2021
Archaeology Field Notebook
2021. Archaeology Field Notebook, Pp. 80. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press.Abstract

Ideal for field archaeology students and professionals, this notebook features a metric grid layout (mm) and centimeter scales on the edges of the inside front and back covers. 80 Sheets of acid-free paper. Measures 10” x 7-5/8”.

To purchase this title, please email peapub@fas.harvard.edu

2020
Magdalena de Cao
Jeffrey Quilter. 12/1/2020. Magdalena de Cao, Pp. 472. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

During the early Colonial Period in the Americas, as an ancient way of life ended and the modern world began, indigenous peoples and European invaders confronted, resisted, and compromised with one another. Yet archaeological investigations of this complex era are rare. Magdalena de Cao is an exception: the first in-depth and heavily illustrated examination of what life was like at one culturally mixed town and church complex during the early Colonial Period in Peru.

The field research reported in this volume took place at the site of Magdalena de Cao Viejo, a town on the edge of the Pacific Ocean whose 150-year lifespan ran from the Late Renaissance to the Age of Enlightenment. For a decade, an interdisciplinary team of researchers conducted archaeological and historical research in Peru, Spain, and the United States. Their analysis of documentary sources and recovered artifacts—including metals, textiles, beads, and fragmentary paper documents—opens new doors to understanding daily life in Magdalena de Cao during a turbulent time. Touching on themes of colonialism, cultural hybridity, resistance, and assimilation, Magdalena de Cao provides a comprehensive overview of the project itself and a rich body of data that will be of interest to researchers for years to come.

Shooting Cameras for Peace / Disparando Cámaras para la Paz
Alexander L. Fattal. 12/1/2020. Shooting Cameras for Peace / Disparando Cámaras para la Paz, Pp. 252. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

Bronze Medal, 2021 IPPY Awards

Winner, 2021 John Collier Jr. Award

Honorable Mention, 2022 LASA Visual Culture Section Book Award

As a young Fulbright scholar in Bogotá determined to democratize the photographic gaze and bring new visions and voices to public debate about Colombia’s armed conflict, Alexander L. Fattal founded Disparando Cámaras para la Paz (Shooting Cameras for Peace). The project taught photography to young people in El Progreso, a neighborhood on the city’s outskirts that was home to families displaced by violence in the countryside. Cameras in hand, the youth had a chance to record and reimagine their daily existence.

Shooting Cameras for Peace / Disparando Cámaras para la Paz is a penetrating look at one of Latin America’s most dynamic participatory media projects. The haunting and exuberant photographs made under its auspices testify to young people’s will to play, to dream, and to survive. The images bear witness to the resilience and creativity of lives marked by a war that refuses to die.

With text in English and Spanish, Shooting Cameras for Peace / Disparando Cámaras para la Paz makes vital contributions to studies of collaborative media, photographic activism, and peace and conflict in Colombia. Fattal’s insightful text offers critical reflection on the genre of participatory photography and the structural challenges faced by similar media projects.

The Breakout: The Origins of Civilization
Martha Lamberg-Karlovsky. 10/18/2020. The Breakout: The Origins of Civilization, Pp. 152. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

For much of the twentieth century, Mesopotamia was thought to he the singular "Cradle of Civilization;" and the agents of change that brought it about were thought to be demographic, ecological, and technological. Bronze Age Mesopotamian accomplishments were believed to have diffused outward, influencing the development of civilization in the rest of the world. Part of this Mesopocentric view was revised as archaeological evidence revealed that other unique civilizations had existed in both the Old and New Worlds, but the traditional Near Eastern pattern of development continued to serve as a model.

In the mid-1980s, however, Harvard’s Kwang-chih Chang proposed in Symbols--a publication of Harvard’s Peabody Museum and Department of Anthropology--that China’s first civilization did not evolve according to the conventional Mesopotamian model and argued instead for a new paradigm for understanding the origins of civilization in ancient China and the New World.

In this collection of subsequent Symbols articles and other essays, Maya and Near Eastern studies specialists engage in a stimulating debate of Chang’s thesis, also presented here.

To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes
9/22/2020. To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes, Pp. 488. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press and Aperture. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

 

Foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Photographic Essay by Carrie Mae Weems

Bronze Medal, 2021 IPPY Awards (Photography)
Finalist, 2021 Arles Book Awards (Historical)

Visit our online resource on this publication for more information on this research project, access to online chapters, and more.

The Peabody Museum Press and Aperture are pleased to announce the new publication To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes. The book is a profound consideration of some of the most challenging images in the history of photography: fifteen daguerreotypes of Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty—men and women of African descent who were enslaved in South Carolina.

Made by photographer Joseph T. Zealy for Harvard professor Louis Agassiz in 1850, the daguerreotypes were rediscovered at the Peabody Museum in 1976. Since that time, the images have drawn worldwide interest, provoking wide-ranging interpretation and raising critical questions about the history and conditions of slavery, racism, representation, and identity.

To Make Their Own Way in the World features essays by prominent scholars from the disciplines of history, anthropology, art history, and American studies. Together, they explore such topics as the identities and experiences of the seven people depicted in the daguerreotypes, the close relationship between photography and race in the nineteenth century, and visual narratives of slavery and its lasting effects. The authors also examine the ways contemporary artists have used the daguerreotypes to critique institutional racism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

With over two hundred illustrations, including a portfolio of stunning new photographs by contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems, this book frames the Zealy daguerreotypes as works of urgent social and intellectual engagement. With strong resonance with the events shaping American lives today, this groundbreaking multidisciplinary volume is part of Harvard’s ongoing efforts to grapple with the university’s and the country’s historical and enduring connections to slavery.

“At this moment and in these divided states of America, perhaps more than at any time since their rediscovery in 1976,” Molly Rogers writes, “the daguerreotypes of Jem, Alfred, Delia, Renty, George Fassena, Drana, and Jack command our attention, demanding that we look closely, listen intently, and speak out—however difficult this may be—giving voice to all that we have learned.”

About the Contributors

Ian Askew is an artist working in performance, theater, and music. Recent performance research includes SLAMDANCE, a solo concert on punk and Blackness, and A Story Project, a directing thesis on process and storytelling. Recent collaborations include assisting directing The Black Clown (The American Repertory Theater, Lincoln Center) and Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine (The Met Museum) alongside director Zack Winokur. They are a 2019 graduate of Harvard College where they co-founded the Harvard Black Playwrights Festival. 

Ilisa Barbash is curator of visual anthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. She co-directed the films In and Out of Africa (1992) and Sweetgrass (2009), which was nominated as best documentary film for the Independent Spirit Awards, Gotham Award, IDA Documentary Award, and Cinema Eye Awards and was selected for the U.S. State Department and the University of Southern California’s 2012 American Documentary Showcase. She co-wrote Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Video (1997) and co-edited The Cinema of Robert Gardner (2007). Barbash’s book Where the Roads All End: Photography and Anthropology in the Kalahari (Peabody Museum Press, 2016) was the recipient of the Society for Visual Anthropology’s 2017 John Collier Junior Award for visual excellence in the use of still photography.

Robin Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and professor of African and African American Studies and of studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of the multi-award-winning book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011). Bernstein co-edits the book series Performance and American Cultures for New York University Press.

Keziah Clarke is a graduate of Harvard College, class of 2020, concentrating in History and Literature with a citation in Arabic.

Matthew Fox-Amato is assistant professor of History at the University of Idaho. He is the author of Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (2019), which was a finalist for two awards: the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award. He received a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. in history, with a certificate in Visual Studies, from the University of Southern California.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An Emmy Award–winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Gates has authored or co-authored twenty-four books, including Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019). Among his twenty-one documentary films are Black in Latin America (2011), The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (2013), Black America since MLK: And Still I Rise (2016), Africa’s Great Civilizations (2017), Reconstruction: America after the Civil War (2019–), and the popular genealogy series Finding Your Roots, now in its sixth season on PBS. The recipient of fifty-five honorary degrees, Gates was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998 he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal.

Harlan Greene is currently Scholar in Residence at Addlestone Library at the College of Charleston, where he previously served as head of special collections, and as manager of reference and archival services at the college’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture. He was previously archivist and assistant director of the South Carolina Historical Society and director of the North Carolina Preservation Consortium. He is a prize-winning novelist and the author of numerous books and articles on the culture and history of the South Carolina low country. Some of his works include Mr. Skylark: John Bennett and the Charleston Renaissance (2001); The Damned Don’t Cry, They Just Disappear: The Life and Works of Harry Hervey (2017); and Slave Badges and the Slave Hire System of Charleston, South Carolina, 1783–1865, with Harry S. Hutchins, Jr., and Brian E. Hutchins (2003).

Gregg Hecimovich is professor and chair of the Department of English at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. From 2014 to 2015, Hecimovich was a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. From 2015 to 2016, he served as the Josephus Daniels Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and was a Public Scholar Fellow appointed by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The author of four books, including Puzzling the Reader: Riddles in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (2008), he is currently working on The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of the Bondwoman’s Narrative and a separate monograph based on the material that appears in his chapter in this volume.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. A pioneering scholar in African American women’s history, she is known for coining and theorizing the “politics of respectability” in her prizewinning book Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church 1880–1920 (1993), and she is co-editor, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of the African American National Biography (2013). Higginbotham thoroughly revised and rewrote the ninth edition of the classic African American history survey From Slavery to Freedom (2010), which was first published by John Hope Franklin in 1947. She has now authored the tenth edition for publication in 2020. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2015 for “illuminating the African American journey.”

Christoph Irmscher teaches at Indiana University Bloomington, where he is Distinguished Professor of English and George F. Getz, Jr., Professor and Class of 1942 Professor in the Wells Scholars Program, which he also directs. Among his books are The Poetics of Natural History (1999; second edition, 2019), one of the earliest treatments of Agassiz’s photographs; Longfellow Redux (2006); Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science (2006); Max Eastman: A Life (2017); Stephen Spender, Poems Written Abroad (2019); and the forthcoming Love and Loss in Hollywood: Max Eastman, Florence Deshon, and Charlie Chaplin (co-written with Cooper Graham). Irmscher is also the editor of Louis Agassiz’s Introduction to the Study of Natural History (2017).

Jonathan Karp is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies at Harvard University.

Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is associate professor of History of Art and Architecture and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the guest editor of the landmark “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture magazine, which received the 2017 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography, and was the inaugural recipient of the Freedom Scholar Award from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) in 2019. Her research interests focus on representations of race in contemporary art and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture and across the Black Atlantic world. She is the author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (2014) and is currently finishing a book on race and photography and the Caucasian War for Harvard University Press.

Eliza Blair Mantz graduated from Harvard College in 2018 with a degree in Theater, Dance, and Media and a secondary in African American Studies. They are now working as an actor and activist in Los Angeles.

William Henry Pruitt III is pursuing a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies with a primary field in English and a secondary in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. His research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, performance, and Black radical thought in the United States.

Molly Rogers is a writer and independent scholar with interests in American history and the history and theory of photography. She is the author of Delia’s Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2010), a history of the Peabody Museum’s daguerreotypes of enslaved Africans and African Americans. In addition to her research and writing, Rogers is associate director of the Center for the Humanities at New York University.

Reggie St. Louis graduated from Harvard College in 2018 and is currently working to develop biomaterials for 3-D printing living human tissue.

Tanya Sheehan is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Art at Colby College and Director of Research at the Lunder Institute for American Art, Colby College Museum of Art. She has been a research associate at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University since 2012 and the executive editor of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art Journal since 2015. Sheehan is the author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2011) and Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor (2018). Her edited books include Photography, History, Difference (2014); Photography and Its Origins, co-edited with Andrés Mario Zervigón (2015); Grove Art Guide to Photography (2017); and Photography and Migration (2018). She is currently working on a book that examines medicine and modernism in art by African Americans.

Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (2000) and the multiple-award-winning The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (2016), which was long-listed for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. She is a contributing author of The Abolitionist Imagination (2012) and co-editor of the two-volume African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the African Slave Trade to the Twenty-First Century (2004) and of Contested Democracy (2004). Sinha’s research interests lie in United States history, especially the transnational histories of slavery, abolition, and feminism, as well as the history and legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

John Stauffer is the Sumner R. and Marshall S. Kates Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of over twenty books and one hundred articles about antislavery and/or photography, including the bestsellers GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (2008) and The State of Jones, with Sally Jenkins (2010). Stauffer’s The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (2002) was co-winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and second-place winner of the Lincoln Prize. The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song that Marches On (2013) and Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American, with Zoe Trodd and Celeste-Marie Bernier (2015), were Lincoln Prize finalists. He has served as a consultant on numerous exhibitions, documentaries, and feature films.

Carrie Mae Weems is an internationally renowned contemporary artist whose work resides in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern; Whitney Museum of American Art; National Gallery of Canada; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Her many publications include The Hampton Project (Aperture, 2001), The Louisiana Project (2005), and Kitchen Table Series (2016). Among her numerous awards and grants are the Prix de Rome, the National Endowment for the Arts grant, Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, Anonymous Was a Woman and the Tiffany awards, and a U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts. In 2013, Weems received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship as well as the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She is represented by the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City.

Deborah Willis is an artist, author, and curator and University Professor and chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is a MacArthur and a Guggenheim Fellow and was a Richard D. Cohen Fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Willis received the NAACP Image Award in 2014 for her co-authored book Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery, with Barbara Krauthamer (2013), and in 2015 for the documentary Through a Lens Darkly, inspired by her book Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (2000). Other notable publications include The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, with Carla Williams (2002); Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009); Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs, with Emily Bernard (2009); and Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot” (2010).

John Wood received the 2009 Gold Deutscher Fotobuchpreis for his collection of poems Endurance and Suffering: Narratives of Disease in the 19th Century (2007) and was awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize of the University of Iowa Press twice, for In Primary Light (1993) and The Gates of the Elect Kingdom (1996). His Selected Poems 1968–1998 was published in 1999. He founded and directed McNeese University’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and held professorships there in both English literature and photographic history. He was co-curator of the 1995 Smithsonian Institution/ National Museum of American Art exhibition Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype, and his book based on the exhibition was selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the “Best Books of 1995.” Wood is editor and co-founder of 21st Editions and co-editor of the German fine arts press Edition Galerie Vevais.

2019
Kebara Cave, Mt. Carmel, Israel, Part II: The Middle and Upper Paleolithic Archaeology
12/31/2019. Kebara Cave, Mt. Carmel, Israel, Part II: The Middle and Upper Paleolithic Archaeology, Pp. 456. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

The remains from Skhul, Qafzeh, Amud, and Kebara caves in Israel provide evidence for the possible contemporaneity and eventual replacement of several distinct hominin populations over time: early Archaic-Modern humans by Neanderthals, and Neanderthals by Modern humans. Kebara Cave, which dates to 65,000 to 48,000 years ago, is well known for its Neanderthal remains and marvelously preserved archaeological record. Dense concentrations of fireplaces and ash lenses and rich assemblages of stone tools, animal bones, and charred plant remains testify to repeated and intensive use of the cave by late Middle Paleolithic foragers.

This second and final volume of the Kebara Cave site report presents findings from nine years of excavation and analysis of the archaeology, paleontology, human remains, and lithic industries from the Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods. Its full documentation of the daily activities of the cave’s Neanderthal inhabitants clearly indicates behavioral patterns generally attributed only to Modern humans. The two volumes on Kebara Cave provide a cornerstone for the story of humankind in a critical geographic region: the continental crossroads between Africa and Eurasia in the Levant.

Far & Near: Selections from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology
Pamela Gerardi. 1/21/2019. Far & Near: Selections from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Pp. 112. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press.Abstract

3rd place, 2019 NEMA Awards (Books)

Since its founding in 1886, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University has been collecting, caring for, exhibiting, and researching objects produced by human cultures around the world. This handsomely illustrated, highly portable volume presents a selection of more than 90 objects in honor of the museum’s 150th anniversary in 2016–2017. Dating from Paleolithic times to the present and originating from the Arctic Circle to South Pacific, these selections represent but a fraction of the 1.4 million pieces in the museum’s collections. They range in character from the sacred to the profane, the utilitarian to the highly decorative, the deeply symbolic to the outrageously whimsical.

Chosen by the museum’s curators and staff, the works presented in Far & Near provide a tantalizing glimpse into the wonders of the collections of the Peabody Museum and reflect the skilled artistry of human hands and the endless creativity of the human mind.

2018
Caspian: The Elements
Chloe Dewe Mathews, Morad Montazami, Sean O’Hagan, and Arnold van Bruggen. 10/1/2018. Caspian: The Elements, Pp. 216. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press and Aperture. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

Caspian: The Elements is Chloe Dewe Mathews’s record of five years spent roaming the borderlands of the Caspian Sea. In a resource-rich region roiled by contested geopolitics, Dewe Mathews found that elemental materials like oil, rock, and uranium are central to the mystical, practical, artistic, religious, and therapeutic aspects of daily life. With essays by Morad Montazami, Sean O’Hagan, and Arnold van Bruggen, Caspian: The Elements offers a series of powerful visual narratives that explore the deep links between the peoples of the Caspian and their enigmatic and coveted landscapes.

Still Points
Robert Gardner. 9/10/2018. Still Points, Pp. 112. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

Still Points is a collection of remarkable and evocative still photographs taken by award-winning nonfiction filmmaker and author Robert Gardner during his anthropological and filming expeditions around the world. Thousands of his original photographic transparencies and negatives from the Kalahari Desert, New Guinea, Colombia, India, Ethiopia, Niger, and other remote locations are now housed in the Photographic Archives of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. This elegantly produced volume presents a curated selection of more than 70 color and black-and-white images made by Gardner between the 1950s and the 1980s. Edited by Adele Pressman, Gardner’s wife and literary executor, and with a foreword by Eliot WeinbergerStill Points both honors an important and influential artist and reveals new dimensions in his work.

Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 10: Part 1: Cotzumalhuapa
Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos. 1/15/2018. Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 10: Part 1: Cotzumalhuapa. Edited by Barbara Fash, Pp. 64. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

For more than 45 years, the Peabody Museum has been publishing The Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions. The goal of this unique series of folio volumes is to document in photographs and detailed line drawings all known Maya inscriptions and their associated figurative art to advance the study of the ancient Maya. When complete, the Corpus will have published the inscriptions from over 200 sites and 2,000 monuments. The series has been instrumental in the remarkable success of the ongoing process of deciphering Maya writing, making available hundreds of texts to epigraphers working around the world, and to source communities in in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico.

Each volume in the series consists of three or more fascicles, which examine an individual site or group of neighboring sites and include maps of site location and plans indicating the placement monuments within each site. Each inscription is reproduced in its entirety in both photographs and line drawings with descriptive texts.

 

2017
Where the Roads All End
Ilisa Barbash. 5/29/2017. Where the Roads All End, Pp. 302. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

Photography and Anthropology in the Kalahari

Where the Roads All End tells the remarkable story of an American family’s eight anthropological expeditions to the remote Kalahari Desert in South-West Africa (Namibia) during the 1950s. Raytheon co-founder Laurence Marshall, his wife Lorna, and children John and Elizabeth recorded the lives of some of the last remaining hunter-gatherers, the so-called Bushmen, in what is now recognized as one of the most important ventures in the anthropology of Africa. Largely self-taught as ethnographers, the family supplemented their research with motion picture film and still photography to create an unparalleled archive that documents the Ju/’hoansi and the /Gwi just as they were being settled by the government onto a “Bushman Preserve.” The Marshalls’ films and publications popularized a strong counternarrative to existing negative stereotypes of the “Bushman” and revitalized academic studies of these southern African hunter-gatherers.

This vivid and multilayered account of a unique family enterprise focuses on 25,000 still photographs in the archives of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Illustrated with over 300 images, Where the Roads All End reflects on the enduring ethnographic record established by the Marshalls and the influential pathways they charted in anthropological fieldwork, visual anthropology, ethnographic film, and documentary photography.

2016
The Resolution of the Suspect
Miki Kratsman Ariella & Azoulay. 6/28/2016. The Resolution of the Suspect, Pp. 216. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press and Radius Books. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

First Place, 2017 New England Book Show (General Trade, Illustrated)

First Place, 2017 NEMA Awards (Books)

Miki Kratsman has worked as a photojournalist in the Palestinian Occupied Territories for over three decades. Originally created in the context of daily news, his tens of thousands of photographs have, in retrospect, taken on fascinating new meanings, as bystanders become protagonists and peripheral details move to the center. Isolated from the original frame, cropped, enlarged, and redisplayed, the reimagined images ask us to explore the limits of the observer’s gaze under conditions of occupation.

Kratsman’s photographs look at both “wanted men”—individuals sought by the Israeli state—and the everyman and everywoman on the street who, by virtue of being Palestinian in a particular time and place, can be seen as a “suspect.” The work is both transgressive and banal, crossing boundaries between Israel and Palestine, “wanted” and “innocent,” street photography and surveillance imagery. Kratsman has also provoked vital, long-term interaction around the images on social media, creating a Facebook page on which viewers are invited to identify the individuals portrayed and comment on their “fate.” His complex project is chronicled in this book in more than 300 images that powerfully implicate the viewer as we follow the gaze of both occupier and occupied within a complex web of power relations around issues of life and death.

A thought-provoking text by Ariella Azoulay engages intimately with Kratsman’s images. Looking at various models of historical and civil construction of the gaze, Azoulay explores the ways in which the shadow of death is an actual threat that hovers over Kratsman’s photographed persons and frames both individuals and the borrowed time within which they exist.

A supplemental booklet contains hundreds of portraits and evocative messages from Kratsman’s Facebook proj

2014
NEPAL: 1975–2011
Kevin Bubriski. 9/30/2014. NEPAL: 1975–2011, Pp. 224. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press and Radius Books. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

Preface by Robert Gardner

Essay by Charles Ramble

Third Place, 2015 New England Book Show (Cover)

Photographer Kevin Bubriski has been visually documenting the country and people of Nepal since his first visit in 1975. Sent as a young Peace Corps volunteer to the northwest Karnali Zone, the country’s remotest and most economically depressed region, he spent three years walking the length and breadth of the Karnali, planning and overseeing construction of gravity flow drinking water pipelines. He also photographed the local villagers, producing an extraordinary series of 35mm and large format black-and-white images. For nearly four decades, Bubriski has maintained his close association with Nepal and its people. Both visual anthropology and cultural history, this remarkable body of photographic work documents Nepal’s evolution from a traditional Himalayan kingdom to a rapidly changing, globalized society. Nepal: 1975–2011 also offers an incisive and comprehensive look at the aesthetic evolution of an important contemporary photographer.

Kevin Bubriski is Assistant Professor of Photography at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont, and was the 2010 recipient of the Robert Gardner Visiting Artist Fellowship at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.

Co-published with Radius Books.

2013
A Lakota War Book from the Little Big Horn: The Pictographic "Autobiography of Half Moon"
Castle McLaughlin. 12/13/2013. A Lakota War Book from the Little Big Horn: The Pictographic "Autobiography of Half Moon", Pp. 368. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press and Houghton Library. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

Foreword by Chief Joseph Brings Plenty, Cheyenne River Sioux

Houghton Library Studies 4

Winner, Bookbuilders of Boston/New England Book Show (General Trade, Illustrated)

First Place, NEMA Awards (Books >$500k)

"Transformative." Candace Greene

The composite nineteenth-century document known as "The Pictorial Autobiography of Half Moon, an Uncpapa Sioux Chief" has at its core seventy-seven drawings made by Lakota warriors of the northern Plains. Found in a funerary tipi on the Little Bighorn battlefield after Custer's defeat in 1876, the drawings are from a captured ledger book that was later acquired by Chicago journalist James "Phocion" Howard. Howard added an illustrated introduction and leather binding and presented the document as the autobiographical work of a "chief" named Half Moon.

Anthropologist Castle McLaughlin probes the complex life history and cultural significance of the ledger and demonstrates that the dramatic drawings, mostly of war exploits, were created by at least six different warrior-artists. Examining how allied Lakota and Cheyenne warriors understood their graphic records of warfare as objects as well as images, McLaughlin introduces the concept of "war books"—documents that were captured and modified by Native warriors in order to appropriate the power of Euroamerican literacy. Together, the vivid first-person depictions in the ledger—now in the collection of Harvard's Houghton Library—make up a rare Native American record of historic events that likely occurred between 1866 and 1868 during Red Cloud's War along the Bozeman Trail.

A complete color facsimile of the Houghton ledger is reproduced in this ground-breaking volume.

Castle McLaughlin is Peabody Museum Curator of North American Ethnology.

"McLaughlin’s latest publication brings readers into the world of the real Crazy Horse. … As McLaughlin explains, these [ledger] drawings are as rich and informative as any Euro‐American literary text"

—Henry Adams, Ruth Coulter Heede Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University, The Conversation

>> read the full review 

 

"...completely engrossing."—David Wilk, WritersCast: The Voice of Writing

>> read the full review and listen to an interview with Castle McLaughlin

 

Please request signed copies when ordering by email.

Copublished by Peabody Museum Press and Houghton Library

Stephen Dupont: Piksa Niugini Portraits and Diaries
Stephon Dupont. 11/13/2013. Stephen Dupont: Piksa Niugini Portraits and Diaries, Pp. 216. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

Foreword by Robert Gardner
Essay by Bob Connolly

"Best Books 2013...The attraction of Dupont's books is that his photographs exhibit enormous passion and enthusiasm and are an effort to unlock the nature of the relationship between photographer and subject."
THE Magazine

This publication records acclaimed Australian photographer Stephen Dupont’s journey through some of Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) most important cultural and historical zones: the Highlands, Sepik, Bougainville, and the capital city of Port Moresby. Through images and personal diaries, Dupont’s remarkable body of work captures the human spirit of the people of PNG in their transition from tribalism to globalization. The project was conducted in 2011 with the support of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography given by Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology.

Piksa Niugini consists of two hardcover books inside a special slipcase. The first volume is a collection of portraits in luscious duotone and 4-color reproduction; the second is a vibrant collection of the diaries, drawings, contact sheets, and documentary photographs that chronicle Dupont’s experience and working process and richly contextualize the more formal images in volume one. An exhibition of Dupont's New Guinea photographs is on display at the Peabody through September 2, 2013.

Dupont’s photographs have received international acclaim for their artistic integrity and valuable insight into peoples, cultures, and communities that are under threat or in the process of rapid change. The photographer’s many awards include a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America, a Bayeux War Correspondent’s Prize, and first places in the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Australian Walkleys, and Leica/CCP Documentary Award. In 2007 Dupont was the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography for his ongoing project on Afghanistan. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Aperture, Newsweek, GQ, French and German GEO, Le Figaro, Liberation, The Sunday Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Stern, Time, and Vanity Fair.

Anthropology at Harvard: A Biographical History, 1790–1940
David L. Browman Stephen and Williams. 7/15/2013. Anthropology at Harvard: A Biographical History, 1790–1940, Pp. 602. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press. BUY THIS BOOKAbstract

"A monumental achievement"—American Journal of Physical Anthropology

Anthropology at Harvard recounts the rich and complex history of anthropology at America’s oldest university, beginning with the earliest precursors of the discipline within the study of natural history. The story unfolds through fascinating vignettes about the many individuals—famous and obscure alike—who helped shape the discipline at Harvard College and the Peabody Museum. Lively anecdotes provide in-depth portraits of dozens of key individuals, including Louis and Alexander Agassiz, Frederic Ward Putnam, Mary Hemenway, Alice Cunningham Fletcher, Sylvanus Morley, A. V. Kidder, and Antonio Apache. The text also throws new light on longstanding puzzles and debates, such as Franz Boas’s censure by the American Anthropological Association and the involvement of Harvard archaeologists in espionage work for the U.S. government during World War I.

The authors take a “cohort” perspective, looking beyond the big names to the larger network of colleagues that formed the dynamic backdrop to the development of ideas. The significant contributions of amateurs and private funders to the early growth of the field are highlighted, as is the active participation of women and of students and scholars of diverse ethnic backgrounds. A monumental achievement, Anthropology at Harvard makes an important contribution to the history of Americanist anthropology.

"Overall, Anthropology at Harvard provides a comprehensive view of the East Coast development of the discipline and handles a prodigious amount of data remarkably well."—Donald McVicker, Isis >> read the full review

 

"Anthropology at Harvard will serve as an important, though limited, work of reference for historians of archaeology and anthropology."—Vincent Crapanzano, "Natives," The Times Literary Supplement >> read the full review

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