I hear that time is just a watch that you wind
You may known Marguerite Harrison from the silent-film era documentary Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, which she made with the two men who later went on to make King Kong. In 1925, the same year Grass was released, she and three other women formed The Society of Woman Geographers. The story of The Intrepid ’20s Women Who Formed an All-Female Global Exploration Society, by April White, is at Atlas Obscura.
“My first encounter with a cave filled with human skulls and bones occurred in 1928 at Huxjal.” Frans Ferdinand Blom knew how to start an article. His bio is now up at Jazz Age Adventurers.
An eyewitness account of trapping passenger pigeons in New Jersey in the early 1800s is one of only two publications by the woman who founded one of the premier paleontological museums in America.
In 1927, a short communication was published in the journal The Condor that quoted a letter from John Thomas Waterhouse to his parents back in England. Waterhouse described how the New Jerseyans hunted passenger pigeons using nets and guns. Continue reading “Annie Alexander’s Contribution to Passenger Pigeon Research”
Trowelblazing archaeologist/ethnologist Birdie Parker, a.k.a. Bertha Parker Cody, is also a Woman of the Mother Road.
In 1919, James Henry Breasted, archaeologist and founder of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, embarked on a year-long trip through the Middle East. His goal was to identify research opportunities throughout the area, and to obtain artifacts to bring back to Chicago. The story (from a 2010 exhibition at the Institute) was told in Archaeology Magazine.
Rhythm and Reaction: The Age of Jazz in Britain has opened at William Waldorf Astor’s former Mansion, Two Temple Place, in London.
From the press release:
Jazz provoked reactions ranging from devotion to abhorrence when the idea, and then the sound, of the music first entered the consciousness of the British public in the aftermath of the First World War. Visiting American groups such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the Southern Syncopated Orchestra offered Britons their first chance to experience the music live.
The growing interest in jazz brought black and white musicians, artists and audiences together, and was crucial in influencing changes in British society, moving from stereotypes descended from the minstrel show to a more nuanced understanding of and interest in African American and black British culture.
The exhibition brings together painting, prints, cartoons, textiles and ceramics, moving film, instruments and the all-important jazz sound, to explicitly examine the influence of jazz on British art, design and wider society.
More details and photos at 1843 Magazine.
By digging at the site of the Presidio San Agustín del Tucson in 1929, Engineer Donald Page gets the nod as Tucson, Arizona’s first historical archaeologist. That was his only excavation, and less than ten years later, his life took a tragic/stupid turn (alcohol and a handgun were involved). See Donald Page: Tucson’s Tragic First Historical Archaeologist by Homer Thiel.
From the UK’s National Archives, details on politics and permits regarding archaeology in Syria in the 1930s, featuring Jazz Age Adventurer Leonard Woolley:
Archaeological business as usual? Digging in the Hatay in the 1930s by Juliette Desplatt
Physical anthropologist Henry Field, as in, the Field Museum, added to the list of Jazz Age Adventurers.
Discovered another Trowelblazers post with a Lamoka connection, which led me into the interesting and complex family history of Arthur Parker.
Bertha “Birdie” Parker Pallan Thurston Cody was the daughter of Beulah Tahamont Parker and Arthur Parker, New York State Archaeologist and Rochester Museum director. She had an interesting and complicated life of her own, working as an archaeologist/anthropologist at the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, California for many years. That was only part of her life, however.
Continue reading “Arthur, Beulah, and Bertha: The Extended Parker Family”