SoCal Minds: Rocks, baby books, recordings: Oh, the stories they tell

From the Autry, UCLA & Pomona

Oh, the things that get collected, and, oh, my, what they tell us about ourselves:

In Griffith Park, curators have combined the best of modernity and the recent past to give online audiences an earful. This may be the summer of Wagner and his Ring cycle with that masterwork dominating the cultural scene with its Los Angeles Opera performances and all the associated attention from seemingly every institution in town. But hearken back to a time when Los Angeles pioneer Charles Lummis still was around and inviting all kinds of swells to his Highland Park home and it is now possible to catch an online listen to an opera performance from the turn of the century. The wax cylinder recording is part of a cyber exhibit spotlighting some of the more than 900 captured rarities, most Native American or California Latino folk songs.

In Westwood, curators at the Bruin biomedical library looked twice at a 2003 donation from Barbara Rootenberg, an antiquarian bookseller with a specialty in the history of medicine. Included in her gift was the first of what would become a major collection of baby books, those parental ledgers, often only partially filled out, that were supposed to let moms and dads take note of and even to collect bits from key developmental moments of their growing little darlings' lives. The tomes, which the folks in Westwood found few collecting, and, thus, were able fast to amass more than 1,000 key volumes with relatively little fuss, already have given researchers important historical insights into everything from public health to advertising, marketing , art and sociology.

In Pomona, researchers have combed piles of loose rocks hoping to unearth more surprising history about the heretofore unknown sophistication of Chumash Indian civilization on the Channel Islands, a legacy that now, perhaps, has a slightly more precarious existence even with the protections offered because the area is a federal park. The anthropologists always fear that campers and tourists unwittingly may disturb important archeological sites, if only because they root around and drag stuff off, sometimes just to show park rangers and to ask if the objects they find have any significance. Alas, that can destroy key evidence as to what experts are learning already about the Chumash and particularly their lives on Santa Cruz Island. A Pomona prof says the Native people, in the pre-Colombian era, played a huge role as regional, water-borne merchants. They became exceptionally savvy in their exchanges and those rocks on the isle, a flint-like substance called chert, became important for a reason: They were employed as drills and other tools, so the Chumash could work olivella shells from island beaches into an early currency; Santa Cruz, thus, was once an island mint -- and some of the Native people amassed real wealth as they measured it in days of yore, the prof says.

SoCal Minds