Laboratory of Anthropology

Indians who drifted from their pueblos to Santa Fe last week for their September fiesta and spree found a new building in that capital. Resident Indians, who work as servants and guides, explained like peasant gossips to the newcomers that the new structure was a Laboratory of Anthropology. A rich man from the East called John Davison Rockefeller Jr. who was over at Tucson last spring had given $200,000 for the building. He was very rich, owned coal mines in Colorado.

Another rich man who lives in Santa Fe except when he goes away to Washington, Senator Bronson Cutting, had also given some money for the building.

Dr. Alfred Vincent Kidder, who had been coming to Santa Fe from a boys' school in the East (Phillips Academy, Andover) with a lot of young men for a good many years, was head of the Laboratory of Anthropology.

In charge was another man the Indians had seen for many years. Jesse Logan Nusbaum. Many of the Eastern artists, writers, chatterers and pollywogs of culture who inhabit Santa Fe think Mr. Nusbaum is a Jew. He is an Episcopalian, a Mason, a Republican, and, say all Indians, a "good guy." He used to ask a lot of foolish questions about how do you say this in Navaho, and why do the Hopi do that. Now he knows more about the Indians and their ancestors than Indians themselves know. He has a young son, Deric, who gets on well with Indians and has written a book about them.* The elder Nusbaum likes to go picking into dirty old caves, and if he finds a bit of painted pottery or a woven basket he is as happy as if he had found a chunk of turquoise in a matrix of silver. He docs not go nosing into an Indian's private affairs. If he happens to see a flask of harmless whiskey, he may tell the fellow to throw it away. But he will not have him arrested. One can trust him.

The Laboratory of Anthropology, about which Santa Fe's fiesta-attending Indians gossiped, has just been formally opened. It is the world's only institution of its kind. Its purpose: to answer man's ever lasting curiosity about how he came to live as he does. In the dry U. S. South west, as in dry Peru, Egypt, Palestine and Mesopotamia, remnants of his early society still persist. Diligent searchers find tidbits of information which indicate how families grouped into tribes, tribes into peoples; how man progressed with his domestic utensils, from woven baskets to turned pots, from animal skins to woven clothes; how simple natural science became supernatural religion; how man's learning to cultivate corn required his settling clown on his tilled fields, how the settlements became teeming cities.

P: Field Museum of Natural History at Chicago has under organization a notable contribution to anthropology. In its Hall of Living Man it plans to have 120 life-size bronze statues representing men & women of every contemporary human race. As far as possible they will be prime racial specimens, like Yale's collection of stuffed champion dogs (TIME, Sept. 14). Commissioned to do the work is able Sculptress Malvina Hoffman of Manha tan and Paris.

*Deric With The Indians--Putnam ($1.75).

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