Edward M. Luby

San Francisco State University | SFSU · Museum Studies Program

Non-systematically excavated archaeological legacy collections of antiquities are often undervalued or overlooked by museums because of their unknown provenience and questionable or problematic provenance. This article describes how extensive research into the provenance of an ancient Egyptian legacy collection purchased in Egypt in 1884 by Adolph...

The aim of this article is to give an account of the Ber gi dala exhibition at the Kisumu Museum, Kenya. It focuses on the customs, traditional buildings, and intangible cultural heritage of one of the major tribal groups in Kenya, the Luo. The development and use of this innovative exhibition, insofar as it recreates traditional Luo homesteads is...

In this paper, we examine the curatorial and collections management-related efforts undertaken to establish the research value of an “old” archaeological collection housed in a museum in California for over one hundred years. The archaeological collection assessed is associated with one of the most important archaeological sites in the region, the...

There is excellent evidence for mound construction by nonagrarian groups who fabricated a diverse range of landscape features, including shell mounds, earthen mounds, sand mounds, and concentric or semiconcentric shell rings, dating 7,000 to 3,000 years ago in the American Midwest, American Southeast, and California. The mounded landscapes produced...

Inigo of Rancho Posolmi: The Life and Times of. Mission Indian. Laurence H. Shoup and Randall T. Milliken. Novato: Ballena Press, 1999.182 pp.

This paper examines whether museums in the United States are making organizational adjustments to ensure that their relationships with Native communities are long-lived, healthy, and sustainable. The results of a survey of management practices and organizational structures in American museums concerning the status of long-term relationships with Na...

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The results of a national survey of American art museums concerning the implementation of World War Il-era provenance research are presented. After outlining the reasons why this research is important to the museum community, background information on the issue of World War ll-era looted art is reviewed. The survey process and the twelve questions...

The mortuary behavior of hunter-gatherers associated with a San Francisco Bay area shell mound is analyzed. Mortuary analyses in the region are reviewed and critiqued, highlighting the general difficulties associated with investigating the mortuary behavior of hunter-gatherers. Using the concept of inequality and its link to surplus, a mortuary ana...

Long viewed as ‘kitchen middens’, the shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Area have -provided archaeologists of coastal California insight into the subsistence and ecology of precontact native groups. In this article, the authors develop a framework for understanding the cultural significance of these shellmounds which regards them as intentional...

Long viewed as 'kitchen middens,' the shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Area have provided archaeologists of coastal California insight into the subsistence and ecology of precontact native groups. In this article, the authors develop a framework for understanding the cultural significance of these shellmounds which regards them as intentional c...

In this report, we evaluate a modified version of Eidt ’s (1973) field-based phosphate analysis technique to explore its validity. Soil samples were collected and analysed from an archaeological site in the Sunol Valley, Alameda County, California. Four characteristics were recorded for all soil samples. To evaluate the technique statistically, a r...