CHICAGO, Oct. 25 /PRNewswire/ -- The Field Museum is embarking on a two- year project that could help bridge cultural and scientific barriers exacerbated by the Iraq war.
With the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the museum recently began to study, catalog and reconcile the scattered but priceless collections of materials from the famous 5,000-year-old archaeological site of Kish, 50 miles south of Baghdad. Kish is one of the world's first cities. The first wheels anywhere were found at Kish; two are in The Field Museum's collection.
The museum plans to create a digital catalog of the more than 100,000 Kish artifacts held in Chicago, London and Baghdad. The catalog will be made available in English and Arabic on the Internet and in print.
"This project will make possible, for the first time, a true reckoning of the site's historical and archaeological significance," said William Pestle, Field Museum Collection Manager and one of the principal investigators on this project. "It will also serve as a model for intellectual repatriation of exported archaeological collections."
Reconciling the past
From 1923 to 1933, archaeologists from The Field Museum and Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum explored several of the 40 mounds at the 9- square-mile Kish site located in the floodplains of the Euphrates River. The artifacts found were divided between the two excavating museums and the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.
Ever since, the collections have remained divided, effectively precluding the production of a full site report for this crucial Mesopotamian city and hindering a full understanding of its historical and archaeological significance.
The $100,000 NEH grant will allow The Field Museum to: -- Catalog objects; -- Reconcile the entire collection with excavation records and field notes; -- Reconcile numbers assigned to the objects in the field with museum numbers; -- Stabilize at-risk objects; -- Scan and/or photograph important objects and records, correspondence, etc. -- Disseminate the information to scholars and others around the world.
Work has already begun in Chicago and London. Once political and security risks are resolved in Iraq, the work will continue at the Iraq Museum, which was heavily looted at the start of the war.
The Field Museum holds 32,000 objects from the Kish excavations, including cuneiform tablets, cylinder seals, stone tools, pots, sculptures, figurines and metal implements. Original field cards will be used to determine the archaeological context of many of these objects, which is vital to understanding their use and meaning.
The Field Museum also holds 1,740 photographs and 1,200 feet of film taken during the excavations showing vivid images of the work being conducted. At Kish, workers uncovered the famous chariot burials, wherein chariots pulled by teams of live oxen were buried alongside high status individuals to provide a means of transport in the afterlife.
B-roll available:
The Field Museum is proud to release for the first time ever archival video footage from the Kish expeditions. This footage taken in 1928 is about 45 seconds long and covers various aspects of the work including: crews excavating the site and assembling a temporary railway to haul away debris; monumental architecture; payday; and painstaking excavation of 5,000-year-old treasures.
Digital black & white images also available of the site, workers, railway construction, and the oldest wheels ever found.
CONTACT: Greg Borzo of The Field Museum, +1-312-665-7106, gborzo@fieldmuseum.org
Web site: http://www.fieldmuseum.org/
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