Beckwith Collection brings Indian Culture to Life

Beckwith Collection brings Indian Culture to Life


FROM THE ARTICLE:
When Jim Phillips leads tours of schoolchildren through display cases filled with bowls and other artifacts from the University Museum's Beckwith Collection, he points out that the things in their own cupboards at home could end up in a museum in a thousand years.

"We want to get them thinking that this is not a dead people," the curator of the Beckwith Collection said. "These are things they used every day."


The Collection is a product of the work and collections of Thomas Beckwith, and is located in Missouri. This is from the university:

The Museum's archaeological display features representative artifacts from the Thomas Beckwith Collection, which contains nine hundred whole ceramic vessels and effigy fragments plus approximately two thousand lithics. Most of the objects in the collection were excavated by Thomas Beckwith at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries from mounds on his property in southeast Missouri. In 1913, Beckwith donated his collection to the Third District Normal School, the predecessor to Southeast Missouri State University. Since 1976, the Collection has been housed in the Southeast Missouri Regional Museum. Today the Collection provides unique insights into the culture and lives of prehistoric Native peoples of this region.