Beyond Bones

Kachina dolls are familiar Native American museum objects. They appear in art galleries and anthropology exhibits alike, but they are often misrepresented, misidentified, and misunderstood. Even the term kachina leads to confusion; it is an Anglicized spelling of the Hopi word katsina (singular) or katsinam (plural). In the Hopi worldview, katsinam take on three different […]

The anthropology holdings of the Houston Museum of Natural Science include an extensive collection of ethnographic materials from South America, to be precise, from the Amazon and Orinoco River basins. These basins cover an area of 2.5 million square miles (or roughly twice the size of India). This hot and humid environment is home to […]

Among the Houston Museum of Natural Science’ collections of Plains Indian materials we find a Lakota beaded possible bag. The Lakota people are part of a confederation of seven related Sioux tribes, the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ or “Seven Council Fires.”  They are one of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains of North America. The Lakota […]

When we survey the field of pre-Contact indigenous cultures in the Americas, the ancient Maya are by far the one we know the most about. Like other cultures, the Maya have left us a very rich archaeological record. We can excavate and investigate their cities; we can be awed by the extensive time depth of […]