More than 150 artifacts donated to USU Anthropology Museum
The USU Anthropology Museum has received a donation of more than 150 ethnographic artifacts from all over the world from the estate of Lyman S. and Vivian B. Willardson of Logan, who both had ties to the university.
The collection was gathered over four decades as the couple lived abroad in places such as Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Honduras, where Lyman Willardson worked in irrigation and drainage development. The Willardsons later acquired items as they traveled extensively for work and pleasure and as they received items as gifts from international students they helped at USU.
Lyman Willardson held a master’s degree from USU in agricultural engineering, was a full-time professor from 1974 to 1999 and worked part-time in the agricultural engineering department until his death in 2005. His wife Vivian also received a bachelor’s degree from USU in home economics.
The collection includes many items from the Middle East, which museum coordinator Sara Lundberg said is significant because the museum currently doesn’t have a lot of items from that region.
Among the Middle Eastern items are clothing, several Persian carpets and textiles, as well as the tools that were used to make them. Lundberg said the tools are of special interest to the museum.
“What makes it a little bit more significant is a lot of time he bought the tools that were used to make the things. As anthropologists, we want to examine how people make things, so those are really interesting to us. It’s more than just, ‘Here’s a bunch of really neat stuff,'” Lundberg said.
Laura Huffman, the Willardson’s youngest daughter, said her father liked to make stone and wood carvings himself and was also interested in photography. She said he would buy tools as well as art because he was interested in how people made things.
“He really delighted in seeing how people lived and how they could solve their problems with local materials. He enjoyed seeing their ingenuity,” Huffman said.
Huffman said her father, who died in 2005, originally wanted the collection donated to a local elementary school. She said she felt it could be better used and taken care of at the USU Anthropology Museum and that its placement there would still accommodate her father’s wishes for the collection to educate people.
“He wanted it to go somewhere where it could teach people and where it would be of use, but I didn’t think the elementary school would know what they had, or how to use it,” Huffman said.
All the items in the collection will turn out to be educational, as they must be researched and catalogued by anthropology students before they can be put on display. Lundberg said students in the Anthropology 3310 class will each research one of the artifacts to determine what the items are, where they came from and so on.
The educational possibilities of the collection excited Bonnie Pitblado, the director of the anthropology museum, Pitblado said.
“It’s so varied it gives the students great opportunities for research, so from a professor’s perspective, it’s a great teaching opportunity,” Pitblado said.
Along with the Middle Eastern items, Lundberg said the collection also contains templates for Rwandan tribal spears and some whistles from Central America that could be from near the Mayan Empire. She said the clay whistles look like people and have little balls inside that make the whistle sound like a bird.
“Those are the things that I think are the neatest,” Lundberg said.
The collection also contains a paper mache Haitian voodoo mask, which Lundberg said is unusual to find in a museum.
“It’s not something that’s really out there. People don’t give those away, and they don’t sell them either, because they’re religious. So that’s special,” Lundberg said.
Research will have to be done to determine whether it’s appropriate to display the mask, because Lundberg said anthropology museums have to take cultural sensitivity into account.
Lundberg said because all the new items must be researched, have custom storage boxes made and be put into displays, they probably won’t be on display until around Fall 2008. She said most of the research should be complete by next spring.
“Most museums work at a really slow pace,” Lundberg said. “It takes a while to even store everything, because we want to make sure we store it properly.”
The USU Anthropology Museum is currently closed while the museum and the displays are remodeled. There will be a grand reopening on April 26 at 4:30 p.m. The museum has no admittance fee.