Word: anthropologists
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...feat befitting the noble nuttiness of its originator, a fellow Antipodean has recreated it as a piece of "readymade" sculpture. New Zealand-born, German-based Michael Stevenson, 40, has built a career from the quirks of art history, teasing them out as art-museum "exhibits." Artist or anthropologist? For the 2003 Venice Biennale, he reassembled New Zealand's failed four-wheel-drive vehicle, the Trekka, as a humorous gesture of national self-deprecation. The Queensland Art Gallery's Suhanya Raffel calls Stevenson "an archivist of culture." And to his idiosyncratic eye, Fairweather's raft is a potent symbol...
...Stevenson's resolution was novel. In May, the artist staged an elaborate ceremony at NAK, where The Gift was dismantled and sawn into portions for the two dozen collectors, called Twodo. The bizarre event, presided over by an anthropologist from Cambridge and mimicking the gifting rituals of islands like Roti, brought Stevenson even closer to his subject. Ultimately he saw Fairweather, who was forced to dig ditches in Devon after being deported from Roti, as "a very exemplary case history" of the struggling artist who must barter to survive...
...have an accurate idea of the society that was there before the Europeans arrived. Charles C. Mann, a leading science writer, has decided to remedy that, with his new book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Knopf). The prepub reviews have been glowing. "Unless you're an anthropologist, it's likely that everything you know about American prehistory is wrong," trumpets Kirkus Reviews. "An excellent, and highly accessible, survey of America's past." Galley Girl reached Mann at home in Amherst, Massachusetts...
...Sometimes, however, it's the collectors who are the ones conned. The skilled carvers of the Sepik are also master forgers - and skulls feature prominently in their repertoire. Anthropologist Garnier examined images of the seized skulls for Time, and believes they are, as Stuttgen claims, modern imitations. Should they prove to be genuine, he says they could be worth more than $12,000 in Europe, especially in the Netherlands, which has become a clearing house for such items. Even if they are not ancient items, however, the bones have to be sourced from somewhere. Eoe says the villagers may have...
...boundaries of how well the dna is preserved," says Matisoo-Smith, who will soon send her results to a U.S. lab for replication. Hands dusty from gently loosening fragile bones with a dental pick, Hallie Buckley works in the Efate heat barefooted and in a T shirt. A biological anthropologist at New Zealand's University of Otago, Buckley specializes in prehistoric health, and the discovery of Teouma seems to her a small miracle: "It just keeps getting better." Hidden within these graves, she hopes, are clues about how the first humans in the region interacted with a pristine environment...