On Sunday, May 20 at 3 p.m. in Spiro 2, please join the Anthropology Department and the Archaeological Society of Staten Island for an illustrated lecture by Constanio Del Alamo, “Not the Shards of the Past, but the Mentality: Archer Huntington as Archaeologist.”
Archer Milton Huntington (1870-1955) was a lover of archaeology and of Spain. As the heir of the railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington, he had the resources necessary to indulge his passions. In 1898, the year the Spanish-American War began, 28-year-old Archer excavated in Itálica, the birthplace of the emperors Hadrian and Trajan, near the city of Seville. As he wrote to his mother, “It is not the dishpans and arms of the past I am seeking, but the thinking of the men who used them. A thing which cannot be had in college!” Over the course of his career, Huntington amassed over 2,500 Spanish antiquities from the Paleolithic to the Hispano-Islamic periods. To house the collection, in 1904 he founded the Hispanic Society of America in New York City.
Our guest lecturer, Constancio del Alamo, is the curator of archaeology, sculpture, and textiles at the Hispanic Society of America Museum. He will describe Archer Huntington’s “semi-archaeological experiment” in Itálica, and the ways in which the museum’s collection was formed. Huntington embodied the gentlemen-scholars and philanthropists of his day, creators of so many museums of the United States. Constancio del Alamo, author of several books and articles about Spanish archaeology and medieval art, organized and supervised “El tesoro arqueologico de la Hispanic Society of America” in 2007-08, with a catalogue in Spanish. In this exhibition, the Hispanic Society of America — for the first time in its history — exhibited more than 400 archaeological pieces from its collection in Spain.
Treasures of Itálica, May 20
May 20, 2012
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