The Windy City and the 1893 World's Fair

Hello from the Windy City!

Two weeks on the job and I'm loving what I do.  I'm working in the Anthropology Conservation Lab at The Field Museum and I'm helping to enter artifacts into their new online database system.  The Museum has been collecting since 1893 and has over 26 million artifacts; at any given time, only about 1% of them are on display.  What this project will do is make the collections available so that they can be searched and studied by any researcher or museum who has access, thereby giving a new life to these priceless pieces.

I've also had a chance to tour the 1893 World's Fair exhibit currently at the Museum.  After the 1871 Chicago Fire, the city cleaned itself up, applied for and was granted the space to host the World's Fair.  It was originally supposed to open in 1892 to commemorate Columbus' arrival in the New World, but due to the size and budget it opened in May of 1893.  After the Fair was over, various leading businessmen floated the idea that there should be a museum built to house the artifacts that had been on display.  Marshall Field (the department store tycoon) donated the largest amount of money and The Field Museum was born.

Among the artifacts were a 600 gallon ceramic tea vessel from Japan, troglodite fossils, some of the first taxidermed animals to be put on display, and Inuit and South Seas natives who had been "relocated" to give visitors a look into how they lived.  This was also the first large-scale use of electricity.  The entire Fair was lit by it using Nicola Tesla's lightbulb designs.

It is fascinating to look back at these artifacts.  Not only do they give us a glimpse of what the mindset was like in the late 19th century but many of them are still today providing us with scientific information to help scientists do things like rebuild species' populations.  However, it does make me glad that we live in a scientific world that recognizes the importance of studying an animal in its native environment, whether beast or human.  The advance of the study of Anthropology has a good deal to do with this fact.  As the discipline was progressing in the 1920's and 1930's, the realization that knowledge and learning came easier when the subject was relaxed promoted the idea of studying different cultures in situ, or as they lay.  I.e., the less disturbance you make, the more accurrate an idea you can glean of how the civilization in question actually functions.   Anthropology has taken this up as its guiding principle ever since.