520 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
ties. One group portrayed a Tehuelche Indian family of Patagonia 
packing its belongings on horseback in preparation for moving 
camp. The most appealing of these new groups showed a family of 
Polar Eskimos of Smith Sound, Greenland. In the foreground a 
young man bent over a very small seal he had clubbed at a hole in 
the ice. Beyond him stood the members of his family with their 
dog team and sled. The father was pointing to the small seal and 
laughing heartily because the boy had called for the dog team to 
bring home such a little animal. Not only did this exhibit illustrate 
the details of Eskimo material culture, but the episode selected 
portrayed clearly the good humor of these hardy people who had 
found solutions to the many problems of living on the northernmost 
frontier of human habitation. After more than 50 years’ “run” 
at the Smithsonian Institution this dramatic display is still a favorite 
of museum visitors. It is undoubtedly one of the great masterpieces 
of museum exhibition. (PI. 5.) 
THE CULTURE AREA CONCEPT 
The opportunities to interpret the American Indian to large 
crowds of busy sightseers at the World’s Fairs offered a stimulating 
challenge to the Smithsonian staff. They were not content merely 
to duplicate existing exhibits for display at these great expositions. 
Rather they sought new approaches to the presentation of the 
subject which would result not only in the development of attractive, 
eye-catching exhibit units such as the life-sized groups, but would 
make the entire subject more meaningful to the public. 
When Otis T. Mason was called upon to plan the American Indian 
exhibition for the World’s Columbian Exposition to be held in 
Chicago in 1893, he decided to organize the exhibit around the 
linguistic map of North America which had recently been published 
by the Bureau of American Ethnology. The compilation of that 
map had occupied scholars of the Bureau and a host of collaborators 
for 12 years. Its completion was an important landmark in the 
history of American Indian studies. Never before had an effort 
been made to organize an exhibit that would combine tribes, lan- 
guages, and artifacts in one presentation. 
For several months Mason struggled with the difficulties presented by 
this challenge. Some of the linguistic stocks of North America could 
not be interpreted through objects because there were no artifacts 
made by the speakers of those languages in the Museum’s collections. 
Either the tribes had become nearly extinct or their ways of life 
had become so modified through white contact that it would be 
impossible to obtain a group of objects that would portray their 
traditional customs. Some of the most prominent linguistic stocks 
were represented by tribes spread out over vast areas in quite different 
