New York State Museum

It was summer, and I was on a field trip with my town's community center's daycare program.

We were at the New York State Museum in Albany, New York.

I was in a group with maybe two or three other kids and one of the daycare workers for a chaperone.

We got there in the morning and were told we could roam around the museum with our group until either 12 or 1 when we had to meet back up with everyone for lunch on the third floor.

I've even considered a gas leak in the elevator causing us to hallucinate.

The one thought that's always been in the back of my mind has been that we got onto the elevator and took a ride through another dimension.

Just a little side note, I had a job with a catering company in the Albany area last summer and one of the most common venues we catered at was the New York State Museum.

Over that summer, I rode probably every public elevator in that building and even a cargo elevator they have and not a single one I rode on had any buttons beyond the fourth floor.

She was a Tonawanda Seneca who was a bead worker primarily and She lived in New York State, and she made clothing for herself and for museum collections.

So we are borrowing this wonderful red canvas, it's cotton, overdress from the collection of the New York State Museum.

It'll be displayed alongside a daguerreotype portrait of the maker, where she's wearing, if not the same overdress, a similar overdress.

she made and this is coming from the collection at the New York State Museum that she made her work for at the at the urging of a white anthropologist but what is so fascinating about the story is that she didn't she didn't always follow his instructions he was asking her for a certain he he wanted fancy material She made different choices about how she felt it was best to represent her community in this museum context.

And so we have this really powerful, we're creating a larger scale reproduction because the original daguerreotype is so small and we wanted her to have real

presence in the

We are joined now by Jonathan Lothrop.

He's the curator of archaeology at the New York State Museum.

John, welcome.

Thank you.

This kind of research has never been done on a large scale in New York, and it's only been rarely done in the Northeast in the first place.

And we have the same problem across the Northeast that we have in New York, is that the food remains of these people, the animal food remains, are not preserved because the soils are too acidic.

So this literally gives us a new window on how these people are surviving in the Ice Age and just one other aspect to that is so my boss is Bob Feranek here at the New York State Museum.

He's both director of research and collections but he's also the curator of Ice Age animals and he had radiocarbon dated Preserved fossils of Macedon that are found especially in places like Orange County in southeastern New York.

I show them these photos and I, and I display them, and I, I bring...

I have an exhibit in the New York State Museum, uh, that opens on Wednesday with David Handschuh.

And the whole idea being to not forget.

Mm.

And do you have anything coming up that you wanna promote? Any...

Were you gonna be in any places, uh, pro-

I'm gonna be at the New York State Museum on, uh, on, uh, Wednesday night, where I'm gonna be, uh, speaking with David Hanshu in a symposium at the opening of our exhibit.

Uh, and, uh, I'll be, uh, at, uh, [dog barks] I'll be at, uh, 9/11 at, at the, at the memorial.