Ispaenlinea

Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

According to its charter, the Council for Museum Anthropology is “an all-volunteer membership organization that serves anthropologists and museum professionals dealing with anthropological collections and issues through the journal Museum Anthropology, a regular Column in The Anthropology Newsletter, and occasional meetings, seminars, and special publications. Its mission is to foster the development of Anthropology in the context of museums and related institutions.” This information-rich web site includes an in-depth index to the contents of the Council for Museum Anthropology’s journal, Museum Anthropology. It also delivers regular reprints of the monthly column from The Anthropology Newsletter, listings of CMA’s officers (complete with contact information), and the full text of the bylaws for the CMA. Here you will also find a highly useful collection of links to anthropology museums on the web (among them the Field Museum, the Arizona State Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum and Wake Forest University’s Museum of Anthropology), along with links of interest to museum professionals of all stripes and classes (including the American Association of Museums and the Internation Council of Museums). Perhaps most importantly, the UMA also provides an extensive index of links to university departments around the globe offering specific museum training for anthropology students, these including the anthro departments at Brown, Harvard, Penn State, Seton Hall and Tufts.

This quarterly publication has been the main journal of international anthropological and archaeological debate and reporting for 74 years. Papers range in time focus from Palaeolithic to present and include reporting from all parts of the world on new methods and technologies, heritage issues and museums, theory and ethics, and management and landscapes. Recent articles published online as well as in the paper edition address such topics as the use of henbane (Hyoscyamus niger L.) as a hallucinogen at Neolithic ‘ritual’ sites… Cosmology, calendars and society in Neolithic Orkney. .. and the development of the International Ancient Egyptian Mummy Tissue Bank at the Manchester Museum. Other recent pieces address the introduction of the lapidary engraving wheel in Mesopotamia, the radicarbon evidence regarding the neolithization of Siberia and the Russian Far East, and the palaeoethnobotany of the Indus Civilization. Here you also have interesting investigations of the “oldest ever” brush hut plant remains from Ohalo II in the Jordan Valley, and cimex lectularius L., the common bed bug from Pharaonic Egypt. The website includes an archive of the contents from recent back issues, a full index to the complete 74 years of the magazine’s publication, and notes for would-be contributors along with editorial contact information and details on contributing editors. (By the way, the journal is edited by Caroline Malone assisted by Simon Stoddart, both of the University of Cambridge.)