As a field member of William Adams crew on the Tombigbee Canal excavations
in Mississippi I had the opportunity to visit the Cobb Institute of
Archaeology, originally funded from the profits from margarine, I visited it
on the birthday of one of it's founders, Mrs. Cobb who I think was turning
95 or so and a replica of the "Lion Gate of Ishtar"(?) was reproduced in
fired brick for the stairwell, as an introduction to the Museum. At the time
they were processing steam boat metal parts in conservation. On one side of
the Museum was the "Old World", a replica of Assyrian Empire bas relief, the
stellae of Hammarabi and other objects of antiquite from furthr west of
Southwest Asia (where Mesopotamia was) in the Near East or Middle East,
i.e., small oil lamps, etc. On the other side of the small museum is the
"New World" and right betwixt the two was a large insect that managed to get
in!

As I tried to post the other day, my training was that "historical" (vs.
prehistoric) archaeology uses the written record. Part of the written record
for example, are the tablets from Nuzi, near Mosul (available in the library
at Drew University, Madison, NJ where the Roebling Chapter of the Society of
Industrial Archaeology meets every year) which was excavated by Starr of
HArvard back in the 1920's, which I had the opportunity to study with
ELizabeth Stone, Ph.D., an archaeologist at Stony Brook University, recently
quoted in the papers in reference to the stolen heritage of Civilization,
the thefts discussed in Iraq. She had also written about the thefts in 1991,
which Iraq complained to UNESCO to, had been taken by "coalition forces"
(artifacts in question had been stored out-of-doors) which she stated where
taken by anti-Saddam factions, and the article was supplied as an update to
the World Book Encyclopedia, the electronic edition, which I found out
provided graphics of "Pompano Fish" instead of the two maps of the "Cradle
of Civilization" and a modern geopolitical one. I had alerted her and the
encyclopedists a number of months ago.

It is difficult as a "lumping proletarian" (field crew) to separate the
heritage of the past from "historical" archaeology. How would one suggest
describing it without the "ideology" of religion, i.e., a form of written
history, too, suggested by James Deetz to even determine house foundation
proportions?

George Myers


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