For Immediate Release Media Contact: Greg Borzo (312) 665-7106 gborzo@fieldmuseum.org General Information about The Field Museum: (312) 922-9410 The sound preservation engineers at The Cutting Corporation have found that the most challenging part of preserving these recordings digitally is that the sonobands have become brittle over time. As a result, the grooves on the recordings have altered, making tracking difficult but achievable. Thus, through creative engineering, the voices describing the masks and skulls, weapons and tools, idols and boomerangs, will be saved. “When these workaday recordings were made almost half a century ago, they were seen as little more than verbal notes on what we were getting from Captain Fuller,” said John Edward Terrell, Regenstein Curator of Pacific Anthropology at The Field Museum. “Today, however, these recordings add depth and nuance to his fantastic collection. If we didn’t digitize them while the sonobands are still playable, these voices from the past would be lost forever.” The remarkable collection of ethnographic and anthropological artifacts was gathered by Fuller who over more than 60 years purchased many of the objects and coaxed others away from fellow collectors. In a sense, Fuller collected collections. Within his collection are objects obtained in the 18th century by famed British explorer Captain James Cook as well as other objects collected for his hometown Chichester Museum by his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Another irony is that the objects were not collected with The Field Museum in mind but rather for the British Museum in London. Although Fuller hunted and selected objects that would have complemented that museum’s extensive Pacific collection, the hallowed British Museum turned down the opportunity to purchase Fuller’s lifework. Instead, the entire collection ended up at The Field Museum. Overnight, the Chicago Museum’s Pacific collection became one of the best in the world. To this day, with more than 50,000 objects and 5,500 documentary photographs, it is rivaled only by the British Museum’s Pacific collection. From the beginning, Fuller envisioned his collection as a teaching tool for a scientific comparison of technology and as evidence for the evolution of design. He sought out pieces that were produced before Western influences arrived. Today, many of objects from Fuller’s collection are on permanent display in The Field Museum’s Pacific Hall; the rest are preserved in climate-controlled storerooms, or occasionally loaned to scholars around the world for study. Continue>>