Science Museum of Minnesota

Although it’s located 1,000 miles north of the Mexican border, the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul offers some surprisingly comprehensive coverage of contemporary and ancient Central American cultures.

Currently the museum is offering a fascinating online exploration of Maya culture called “Maya Adventure.” The exhibition surveys important Maya cultural sites, such as Tikal and Chichen Itza, imparting general information about each site with (mostly) color photos and notes.

There is also an extensive photo collection of Mayan cultural artifacts and contemporary Mayan life. One photo of a cylindrical white vase with black and terra cotta-colored highlights, depicts a man grappling with a serpent. The fluidity of the artwork, including the descriptive glyphs accompanying it, while unique to themselves bring to mind the exquisite seeming casualness of Chinese and Japanese ink work.

A nice touch includes activities aimed at school children who may be studying the Maya. The museum’s comfortable knowledge of the Maya is based on its extensive collection of contemporary Maya cultural materials, such as textiles, tools, ceramics, masks and musical instruments, the second largest in North America behind Mexico.

The URL for the online tour is http://www.sci.mus.mn.us/sln/ma/top.html

A second online offering is “Costa Rican Ceramics Then and Now – A Virtual Exhibit” which takes the viewer through a bilingual discussion of ancient, traditional and contemporary Costa Rican ceramics. Visitors can click online photos of exhibit cases and see their contents up close with descriptive captions.

The URL for the exhibit is http://www.smm.org/research/Anthropology/ceramics/top.php

The museum also has a large collection of Mexican folk art and Mexican festival masks from the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The general museum URL is http://www.smm.org/

By Patrick Totty