The Enduring Power of Totem Poles & The West Point Web Sites
Robin Wright, Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture, USA
Becca Bennett, Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture, USA
http://www.burkemuseum.org
Two new web sites have been developed by the Anthropology Division of the Burke Museum at the University of Washington in Seattle. The Enduring Power of Totem Poles Web site is an interactive educational web site designed to allow you to explore the history of totem poles and discover the continuing importance of totem poles to the Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Based on a map of the Northwest Coast, it focuses on several important village locations, providing historic and contemporary photographs of totem poles with their histories, and allows viewers to search a large database of historical photographs of Northwest Coast villages and poles. This web site is being developed by the Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Coast Art. The West Point Web site is an interactive educational Web feature designed to expand public understanding of both archaeology and contemporary Northwest Native culture. This story about Seattle's West Point archaeological site details the site discovery, how archaeologists work, and what they learned about the people who inhabited the site. It also emphasizes the continuing cultural activities of descendent tribes, and how archaeology can illustrate that some traditions of local tribes today have roots that date back thousands of years. This engaging feature site also includes full curricula and lesson plans for teacher classroom use. This web site has been created by the Archaeology Department at the Burke Museum.
Demonstration: Demonstrations [Close-Up]
Keywords: Native American, totem pole, Northwest Coast, archaeology, photography, Coast Salish
