The complex show about an ancient Southwestern civilization that's featured at the New Orleans Museum of Art tells several stories at once, says curator Paul Tarver.
It sheds light on a mysterious civilization that thrived a thousand years ago in what's now northern New Mexico.
It reveals the largely forgotten archaeologist who first explored the ruins of that ancient civilization, and how his personal collection of notes, photos and artifacts came to be hidden away at Tulane University.
And it gives intimate glimpses of the culture of more recent American Indians who occupied the same territory a century ago when it was first studied by white explorers.
Tarver recently gave a tour of "Ancestors and Descendants: Ancient Southwestern America at the Dawn of the 20th Century" a rich, rambling exhibit in the museum's premier downstairs gallery through Oct. 24.
In 1896, Tarver said, George Pepper was an eager 22-year-old intern at Harvard. Despite Pepper's youth and the fact that he had no university degree in archaeology -- or anything else -- he was selected to lead an expedition to learn what he could about a mysterious ruin in a Southwestern territory on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The site was Pueblo Bonito, which Tarver called "the most spectacular archeological ruin in America." Notebooks, drawings, photos and finds from that first expedition and the three that followed now line the walls and crowd the display cases at NOMA.
The trails leading to Pueblo Bonito and the other ruins in Chaco Canyon were primitive back then, Tarver pointed out, and there was little water in the high desert.
In one of the exhibit photos, Pepper's band of rough and ready archaeologists looks like cowboys as they bed down for a cold night in the sand, beside their covered wagons.
That's Pepper, looking like a young Indiana Jones, in the wide-brimmed hat and purple shirt, near the water still in another vintage photo. That's him smoking a cigar while playing poker with the other explorers. And that's Pepper holding a live snake by the tail -- unlike Indiana Jones, Pepper was unafraid of reptiles.
Tarver, who has visited Pueblo Bonito, says that to this day it's "beautiful, eerie and fascinating." When Pepper first saw it, however, it was mounded with centuries of rubble and sand. Shaped like an enormous watermelon slice, the pre-Columbian sandstone fortress is honeycombed with circular ceremonial rooms. One of Pepper's claims to fame is having unearthed three such rooms, littered with undisturbed artifacts.
Particularly intriguing were the Maya-like tumbler-shaped clay vessels that Pepper correctly surmised were used for drinking that sacred elixir: Chocolate. Their taste for chocolate implied that the ancient Chaco Canyon dwellers traded with other civilizations as far south as tropical Mexico.
Ever the professional, Pepper took copious notes in attenuated but meticulous handwriting (Tarver said it took about two hours of trying before he was able to read Pepper fluently) and hundreds of photos (Tarver said that Pepper called himself a Brownie camera fanatic).
As he dug and discovered, Pepper filled railroad cars with artifacts bound for institutions back East.
To aid in the unearthing, he hired Navajo people. In doing so, he became fascinated with their art, lifestyle and rituals. Pepper's private collection of Navajo textiles and Hopi pottery are featured in the show, along with hauntingly detailed photographs of a Hopi snake dance ceremony.
When he wasn't out West digging and cataloging, Pepper gave public lectures, describing his discoveries to Teddy Roosevelt-era crowds with flowery prose and hand-tinted magic lantern slides. A sample lecture is recreated on video in the show.
Our modern love of Southwest art and fashion can be traced to Pepper and his colleagues, who popularized the products of the Southwestern American Indians, Tarver said.
In his time, Pepper may have done more than anyone to illuminate the long-lost Chaco civilization. But the nuances of their culture remain a mystery.
In a way, the same is true of Pepper. The charming collection of photos and relics on display at NOMA gives us an impression of the dedicated discoverer, but, as Tarver points out, little is really known of his "private, subdued" personality. Even Pepper's career accomplishments became a bit obscure due to circumstances following his early death.
"There are parts of the story that we can't fill in, " Tarver said.
Pepper died in 1924 at age 51. Though it would seem more predictable that his private collection would end up at the American Museum of Natural History that employed him during the Chaco Canyon digs, or at the Museum of the American Indian (now the National Museum of the American Indian) where he worked later in his career, that's not what happened.
Instead, Tarver said, an enterprising Tulane administrator asked Pepper's widow to sell the collection to the university, promising to put it on permanent display as a tribute to her husband's career.
When the university administration changed shortly thereafter, the Pepper collection was largely boxed up and put into storage. Tarver knew Tulane had an American Indian archive, but he had not seen it until two years ago, when NOMA intern Cristin Nunez expressed interest in studying Native American arts. When he asked Tulane for a look at the buried Pepper treasure, he was amazed. The NOMA exhibit, co-curated by Tarver and Nunez, is the result.
For Tarver, carefully digging through Pepper's private collection may have been a childhood dream come true. After visiting Mexico as a 6-year-old, Tarver said he dreamed of becoming an archaeologist.
Later, as an art student, he wrote a research paper about ancient Southwestern cultures. And still later, as NOMA's curator of Native American and Pre-Columbian art, Tarver traveled again and again to the same Pueblo Bonito ruin first excavated by Pepper.
Tarver said he's spent roughly 70 days in Chaco Canyon, camping in the desert to spend as much time as possible communing with the enchanting ancient culture that influenced his paintings (Tarver is a well-known New Orleans artist) as well as his museum career.
Discovering that the archive of the earliest Chaco Canyon archaeologist was stashed in the Crescent City was, Tarver said, "like Christmas."
"I would have thought that anything that important would have been explored by someone, " Tarver said of the Pepper archive, "but since it was here and so few people knew about it, it was waiting for me."
Author: Doug MacCash | Source: The Times-Picayune [October 10, 2010]