For Immediate Release Contact: Pat Kremer (312) 665-7100 (For Media Use Only) The Ancient Americas: A Talk with Lead Curator Jonathan Haas Dr. Jonathan Haas is an anthropological archaeologist with more than 30 years of field experience in both North and South America. His research areas include the origins of war, the archaeology of the Southwest and Peru, the evolution of complex society, and museum anthropology. He has been at The Field Museum for 17 years and has curatorial responsibility for the ethnographic and archaeological collections of North America and the archaeological collections of South America. As the lead curator for The Ancient Americas, he took some time to discuss the ideas behind the exhibition. Why did The Field Museum decide to undertake this major renovation of its exhibitions on the Americas? What had changed? Almost everything! The old exhibitions dated from the 1950s, and much of the information in them had changed. But it was more than that. The framework of anthropology itself had changed. The old exhibits presented a picture of static peoples living as they did in the late 19th century, with no explanation of how they came to live that way, and no indication that indigenous peoples are alive and well today throughout the United States and Latin America. The old exhibits described these peoples from the outside, as exotic “others,” and were filled with cartoon-like images depicting the primitive and savage. This wasn’t at all the message a 21st-century museum should convey. What messages do you want to convey? We want to show visitors how culture evolves, how people adapt to changing circumstances, and how that process is the same for all cultures. Cultural evolution is different from biological evolution; it’s based not on genetic changes in but on creativity and problem-solving. All cultures are faced with problems, and the process of solving those problems is the same for all of them – I call it tinkering. Through tinkering, experimenting, some people will arrive at workable solutions, and others will adapt them. The emergence of communities is one example; communities are a result of problem-solving, and they look remarkably the same wherever you find them. In other words, it isn’t just about the past. Today’s museums should give visitors tools for understanding the world around them. In the case of The Ancient Americas, we want to give visitors insights into the origin and the continuing development of their own society – things that are around us constantly, but that we don’t always have the space to think about. For example, why do people settle together and cooperate? Why do we have leadership? Why do we go to war? Warfare isn’t in our DNA, it’s not in our ethnicity. It’s a human invention, and if we want to get control of it, we have to look at what problems it was invented to solve. Continue>>