Inventory, Cataloguing and Preservation of the Stewart Culin North American Indian Collection

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The Brooklyn Museum holds a significant body of anthropological materials. One of the most important for anthropological research are those objects collected between 1903 and 1911 by Stewart Culin, first Curator of Ethnology. Coming from the Southwest, California, and the Northwest Coast, these 9,000 objects represent one of the most well documented systematic collections in anthropology. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is infestation with asbestos, this collection has been unavailable for researchers. This grant will remedy this situation by properly storing, cataloguing, photographing and cross.indexing with the original documentation over 2,000 of the most important objects in the collection. The collection will be reinventoried and thus made available to researchers. Much information has been scattered throughout museum collections and hence essentially lost to us. With the reorganization of collections and their accompanying documentation, museums such as the Brooklyn Museum are discovering vasts amount of information about Native Americans and teaching us much about life at the turn of the century.