At the American Museum 
Faces from the Past 
Most of the attics in the American 
Museum of Natural History are 
tucked beneath the long rooftops and 
Romanesque towers of the Museum’s 
main building. The attics house an 
odd assortment of things, from ele- 
phant bones to Margaret Mead’s old 
Edison phonograph. 
One tower attic, the highest point 
in the Museum, is reached by climbing 
a narrow stairway from the sixth-floor 
storage areas. Echoing down the stair- 
well is the sound of a mountain stream, 
created by water circulating in a sprin- 
kler tank. At the top of the stairs is 
the tank itself, guarded by a wooden 
statue of a woman carved by North- 
west Coast Indians a century ago. 
An attic room to the right, illumi- 
nated by ancient skylights, contains 
the Museum’s large collection of life 
casts. Shelf after shelf is lined with 
plaster busts of once-living Indians, 
Africans, Siberians, Eskimos, and a 
few Patagonians. They look out over 
the garret with blank eyes, the only 
part of a face that cannot be cast. 
Some of the life casts are identified 
by name — Mrs. Lost Horse, Thomas 
Pretty Back, Ghost Face, and Maggie 
Old Eagle, all Oglala Sioux; Bonifacio, 
a Patagonian; Ujaragapssug, a Smith 
Sound Eskimo; Lumbango, a Congo 
Bahumba; Annie McKay, a Tlingit In- 
dian; Shenandoah, an Oneida; and Joe 
Colorado, a Cocapa. Other faces are 
identified only by tribe or culture. 
In a far corner of the attic is a pile 
of cast arms and legs, looking like 
a broken heap of dolls. These were 
cast from life in various positions — 
flexed, extended, relaxed, gripping 
imaginary objects, and so on. 
The life casts were collected in the 
field about the turn of the century 
by various Museum curators and sci- 
entists, including Franz Boas, Adm. 
Robert E. Peary, Waldemar Borgoras, 
and Casper Mayer. Physical anthro- 
pology — in particular the study of ra- 
cial types — had a large following at 
that time, and expeditions customarily 
brought back (in addition to the usual 
baskets, pots, and other aspects of ma- 
terial culture) hundreds of anthropo- 
metric measurements, casts, skeletons, 
and photographs that look like mug 
shots with front, side, and rear views. 
It was also common practice to record 
vast mythological cycles, innumerable 
afterworld beliefs, legends, and tales 
in the original languages. The Mu- 
seum’s scientists shared the belief that 
most aboriginal cultures were doomed 
and that whatever could be preserved 
for future study and the common heri- 
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Sculptor Sigurd Neandross, in his studio in 1908, cradles one of his life casts. 
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