Chicago's Field Museum

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The Field Museum is currently hosting an exhibit of things from Tutankhamun's burial. Many of them have never been out of Egypt until now. There are some amazing items on display -- but unfortunately they won't allow pics.......

The Field does own ancient Egyptian things, and it's ok to photograph them. The collection includes a lot of vessels in gorgeous shapes, made from a wide variety of materials. I've never really understood alabaster (thinking of all those cheapie tourist-trap doodads), but the Egyptian vessels..... Very nice.





Of course, one of the most famous items in the Field Museum is Sue, the largest and most complete T. rex skeleton ever recovered. It's hard to get a decent pic of her, given busy backgrounds and all.





It's a very big museum, and has many different collections. There are shoes from around the world. There are what I think of as "natural history museum displays" of birds and mammals in "naturalistic habitats". There are displays of artifacts from all over the world (not just shoes....).

Here is a taste of the eclectic variety.....

This sash was made by a Hopi weaver.





The fringe is woven nearest the sash, then it bursts forth into wild stuffed balls, before subsiding into decorous plied yarn.





This cute little guy is Chinese.





There are bugs. (As with T. rex, I'm glad I only need to contemplate these at a distance!)





There are all sorts of rocks.





There are WAY more things than a person can possibly give attention to in a single day. I'm sure I haven't mentioned half of them. Go there. Spend at least a day.


I can't leave the museum without showing you this.

You know there are various souvenir-making machines, which you feed with quarters, and an object commemorating that particular place, is made just for you, right then. You know about the mashed pennies, for example. Well, when I was a kid in the late 50s and early 60s, you used to see these things, too. You feed in your quarters, and the machine makes you a molded plastic ... dino, in this case.





The really amazing thing about this is that I still have the stego I got at the Field Museum, way back then. Of course I couldn't resist getting a new one. The wierdest thing is that they are identical -- except that the new one is smaller. They can't have been made with the same mold, but the new mold is *just* like the old one, bump for bump, wrinkle for wrinkle, plate for plate, except that it's smaller.

Sometimes you *can* go back to your childhood, if just for a minute. My bronze stego and my orange one are side by side on my kitchen shelf, old and new, then and now. A tiny bit of continuity in a changing world.





In order to facilitate chronological traverse of these Chicago posts, a link to the next one is here.

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