Field Research
Posted by Joy Meads on 8/31/2009
(Joy is Steppenwolf’s Literary Manager)
One of the things I love about my job is that it continually provides me with opportunities to learn about worlds I never would have seen otherwise. Yesterday morning was a perfect example: I accompanied a group of artists from Fake (director/playwright Eric Simonson, actor Al Wilder, and dramaturg Rebecca Rugg) to the Field Museum, where John McCarter, the museum president, took us on a two hour behind-the-scenes tour as research for the play. Al plays two different museum directors in Fake, so he had a number of questions for Mr. McCarter about his day-to-day responsibilities and the joys and stresses of the job.
Mr. McCarter might have the best office in America: it features a plastic T-Rex head mounted on the wall, framed original Audubon prints, and a 52,000,000 year old fish fossil casually perched atop a side table. He was a generous host and an engaging raconteur, telling us about the evolution of natural history museums and their origins in the “Cabinets of Curiosities” collected by gentleman scientists (one of the characters in Fake is a wealthy hobbyist of this type). He also described the impressive scope of the Field’s activities today. This might sound naïve, but I wasn’t fully aware of the fact that the museum I’ve visited is just one small aspect of the institution’s work. Mr. McCarter showed us a vast store room filled with shelves upon shelves of South and Central American Pottery and told us that the public exhibits represent only one percent of the Field’s collection (they plan to take high-quality digital images of the objects in storage and make them available online to researchers around the world). The museum is also actively engaged in research in the fields of evolutionary biology, paleontology, archaeology, and ethnography, so Mr. McCarter introduced us to a couple of anthropologists to talk about Piltdown Man.
Dr. Robert Martin and Dr. James L. Philips (a Steppenwolf subscriber!) compared the passions ignited within the scientific community by a major discovery like Piltdown to a modern analogue, the “hobbit” controversy. In 2003, scientists discovered 18,000 year old bones belonging to a ~3′ hominid on an island in Indonesia and claimed they represented proof of a new species of human-Homo floresiensis, aka the “hobbit.” A host of scientists, including Dr. Martin and Dr. Philips, vigorously disagreed and a surprisingly passionate controversy arose, with respected scientists in both skeptic and believer camps firing papers back and forth and sometimes becoming a little personal in their critiques. On the car ride back to Steppenwolf, we joked that the “hobbit” controversy sounded like it could be the sequel to Fake. This is an excerpt from Tabatha Powledge’s excellent summary of the controversy:
“H. floresiensis debates have been marked by a degree of acrimony that may seem excessive and even a bit scandalous to outsiders. But a number of paleoanthropologists opine that it’s pretty much the usual fossil furor - even though it’s been punctuated by public name-calling, a high level of rancor, and exceptionally gaudy episodes like the hobbit bones’ unanticipated travels. ‘I don’t think there’s anything special about this dispute, except that it’s taking place in a particular cultural context, which science gets drawn into, just as it does in every other country, at least certain fields of science,’ says Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.”
(If you’d like to learn more, there’s also a Nova episode about the “hobbit.” It’s a fascinating story)
I want to thank the Field Museum for the thought-provoking conversation and their extraordinary generosity (not to mention for letting us zip through the Pirate Exhibit, which you should all go visit because it rocks).