There was a symposium on collectors that included the work of Henry Mercer, Abbott and Dorothy Cross, among others, at the SAA meetings in Philadelphia in 2000. Elin Danien from the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania was involved in the session and may have been one of the organizers. (Sorry, I do not have a copy of the program with me).
-----Original Message-----
From: Timothy James Scarlett
Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2002 4:00 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Collecting
Jim hit on a great example! Mercer is one of my favorite odd-balls from
history!
Henry Chapman Mercer was a very significant collector of antiquities, the
³discoverer² and promoter of the ³Leni-Lenape Stones² with their cryptic
phoenician-esque lettering, a collector of colonial-era tools and material
culture, a big player in the arts-and-crafts movement with his Moravian Tile
Works in Doylestown PA, and was one of the ³archaeologists² selected by the
US government to review the pan-colombian exhibition (or one of those
internationals, I can¹t quite recall the precise one), and on and on. He
even pioneered the use of poured concrete as fire-resistant architecture.
He was also a founder in the development of Material Culture Studies, from
the museum side as well as the archaeology side. Of his colonial farming
tools, he once said, "No history can show as these things show, that during
the war a hundred thousand hands armed with these sickles were reaping wheat
and rye so as to make any kind of war possible." -Henry Chapman Mercer,
1909. That quote I pulled from Steven Conn, 1998 Museums and American
Intellectual Life, 1876-1926. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. He
dedicated a chapter to Mercer.
Mercer loved typological and evolutionary models of archaeology, and would
arrange his colonial tools like Pitt-Rivers aboriginal weapons.
His parents wanted him to be a lawyer. Some things never change.
Cheers,
Tim Scarlett, Doylestown Native
*******************************************************************
Timothy James Scarlett
Incipient Assistant Professor of Archaeology
Program in Industrial History and Archaeology
Department of Social Sciences
Michigan Technological University
1400 Townsend Drive
Houghton, Michigan 49931-1295 USA
Tel (906) 487-2113 Fax (906) 487-2468 Internet [log in to unmask]
MTU Website: http://www.industrialarchaeology.net
SHA Website: http://www.sha.org SIA Website: http://www.sia-web.org
*******************************************************************
"The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a
comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D."
--Nelson Algren (1909-1981), Writers at Work, 1st series, 1958
|