Documentary Educational Resources - Subject / Archaeology / Archaeological Artifacts / All Films

The Earth is Our Home

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:05:00 GMT

The Earth is Our Home
Buy Now: $295.00

This documentary about the early Natives of the Great Basin emphasizes the traditional culture of the last 5,000 years. The story unfolds through the words and skills of the older Paiute women of southeastern Oregon and northern Nevada. They tell us how they make cakes from berries, baskets from tulles, cord for nets...necessary daily tasks linked with an ancient heritage.

The earth is ever present in the film, wildlife, rivers and marshes, sagebrush desert, all part of the story. The lifeways of the Northern Paiutes are followed through a seasonal cycle, from root-gathering in spring to building shelter in winter. The Earth is Our Home is an important historical film about Native North Americans.

This film is excellent for classroom use from 6th grade to adult.

DER thanks Oregon Public Broadcasting for the opportunity to rescue fine archival films from obscurity.

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Full Circle

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

Full Circle
Buy Now: $295.00

In the summer of 2001, under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a totem pole in the Peabody Museum at Harvard University was returned to its original owners' ancestors, a Tlingit community in Southeast Alaska. The journey of the pole began a hundred years ago when it was removed by the Harriman Expedition from the deserted village of Gash at Cape Fox. The totem pole makes its way from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Ketchikan, Alaska, where the Cape Fox community holds a ceremony to welcome home artifacts taken by the Expedition.

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Incidents of Travel In Chichen Itza

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:45:00 GMT

Incidents of Travel In Chichen Itza
Buy Now: $320.00

This original ethnographic video depicts how New Agers, the Mexican state, tourists, and 1920s archaeologists all contend to “clear” the site of the antique Maya city of Chichen Itza in order to produce their own idealized and unobstructed visions of “Maya” while the local Maya themselves struggle to occupy the site as vendors and artisans.

The setting is the spring Equinox, when a shadow said to represent the Maya serpent-god Kukulkan appears on one temple pyramid. As more than 40,000 New Age spiritualists and secular tourists from the United States and Mexico converge to witness this solar phenomenon, the video depicts the surrounding social event as a complicated entanglement of expected dualisms concerning tourism. Going beyond previous films that reduce tourism to neo-colonial and exoticizing social relations, this video portrays a Maya cultural site where US New Agers — rather than local Mayas — appear as exotic ritualists who are on display for other secular tourists and for local Mayas.

While the video does examine representations of Mayas by visiting New Agers as part of globalizing discourses on the exotic and evolution, it also shows how during the ongoing economic crisis, resident Mayas struggle against the Mexican state — rather than against tourists — that regularly “sweeps” them from the tourist zone in order to anchor the nation in an image of pure antiquity.

This video also asks what kind of fieldwork is possible as part of such a spectacle. It questions the status of ethnographic authority as people from the various groups converging on the event, ironically including the anthropologist-videomakers, trade positions and compete to speak about the Maya.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Society for Visual Anthropology Film Festival, Award 1997

Margaret Mead Festival, 1997

Royal Anthropological Institute, Material Culture and Archaeology Prize, 1998

Latin American Studies Association Film Festival, Washington DC, 2001

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Roots of African Culture

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 08:59:00 GMT

Roots of African Culture
Buy Now: $295.00

"This is very important for us. Not only to engage and for the reconstruction of the historical past, but also for our national heritage." — Professor Yonah Seleti

Historical revisionism and propaganda were important elements of apartheid ideology, proclaiming that black peoples were not the owners of Southern Africa by stating that the whites arrived in the same areas at nearly the same time. Today, a crucial objective of South African education is to erase this interpretation as presented in earlier textbooks, and to give their students a genuine history of their country.

Roots of African Culture, a video produced by the University of Natal, is an indispensable pedagogical tool for this purpose. Recording the teaching process of Professors Jeff Guy, Leonard van Schalkwyk, Haskell Greenfield, and Yonah Seleti, this video depicts the entire process through which students are enabled to rediscover the history of Africa. Examples of falsified apartheid literature are juxtaposed against the fieldwork evidence that shows evidence of the first South African settlements, in existence well before the arrival of European populations in Natal area in 1652.

Under the supervision of experts, students participate in archaeological excavations in Northern KwaZulu-Natal, between "historic" Natal and the Zulu Kingdom, where African communities lived in the Iron Age. The entire process of excavation of a site is described and carried out. The process of "Carbon 14 dating" is explained.

Through this concrete and delightful academic experience students are finally able to affirm the existence of African farming communities during the 8th century.

Suitable for African Studies, archaeology, anthropology, history, and educational practice.

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A Search For Vanished People

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 07:45:00 GMT

A Search For Vanished People
Buy Now: $295.00

Pioneering archaeologist, Luther Cressman, pursued the evidence that describes the lifeways of the earliest people of the Northern Great Basin. Cressman explores the caves where he discovered basket fragments, sagebrush sandals and ancient weapons. Carbon dating verified that people had lived in the region during the last Ice Age, 13,000 years ago. This film shows Dr. Cressman's more than 40 years of research on western prehistory.

A Search For Vanished People is an important historical film about Native North Americans.

DER thanks Oregon Public Broadcasting for the opportunity to rescue these fine archival films from obscurity. This film is excellent for classroom use from 6th grade to adult.

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The Tree of Iron

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 08:57:00 GMT

The Tree of Iron
Buy Now: $320.00

Tree of Iron is one of the few films to document archaeological work on ancient civilizations in Africa. The film details the history and processes of African iron smelting and presents convincing evidence for early, complex indigenous technologies.

Tree of Iron is set in Tanzania, East Africa, on the western shores of Lake Victoria, where Haya people have lived for centuries. The film follows the work of Peter Schmidt, an archaeologist and historian who studies the ancient, 2000-year-old iron industrial sites of the region, as well as extensive oral traditions that illustrate the role of iron in agriculture, political power, and mythology.

The tree in the film's title refers to an enormous tree of great antiquity that is the symbolic center of Haya iron production. Linked to rich iron symbolism, a vibrant mythology, and to ancient iron forges and furnaces, the site of this iron tree produced the first evidence for ancient, sophisticated metalworking technology.

Schmidt works with African iron smelters who build and operate reconstructed versions of traditional furnaces to demonstrate the technological principles that ancient workers used to produce high carbon steel. It also illustrates the degradation of the environment caused by this ancient industry. The film's experimental and comparative approach takes the viewer through each of the technical steps involved in smelting, from charcoal production to furnace construction.

The 80 to 90-year-old Haya smelters are the primary actors in this remarkable process. Tree of Iron combines foci on archaeology, ethnography, and metallurgy to overturn faulty ideas about the history of technology in Africa and replace them with an emphasis on wonder and achievement.

"This important film deserves a wide audience...it is one of the very few films to document archaeological work in sub-Saharan Africa and the only one to examine ethnoarchaeological research and experimentation there.

Peter Schmidt has combined the talents of archaeologist, ethnologist and metallurgist in his quest to understand early African iron smelting. This entire project is an exemplary model of interdisciplinary archaeology, and we are fortunate not just to have a record of it on film, but to have a record of such high quality."
— Peter Allen, ARCHAEOLOGY

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Tikal

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 08:57:00 GMT

Tikal
Buy Now: $295.00

Tikal, the Mayan ceremonial center in the Peten lowlands of Guatemala, is famous for its monumental pyramids and stelae. Hidden in the jungle nearby are thousands of house mounds where, a millennium ago, worshippers and workers lived. This film focuses on the archaeology of one house mound excavated in 1960.

Tikal explores what we can learn from these domestic remains, particularly about the people who created and maintained this great intellectual and religious Mayan culture. This Special Edition DVD also features commentary by Karl Heider (26 min) and a narrated pictorial history (9 min) of Heider's career in archaeology and anthropology.

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Talking Stone

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 08:56:00 GMT

Talking Stone
Buy Now: $320.00

Hidden away in the canyons of a top-secret military base on the edge of the Mojave Desert is the largest concentration of rock art in North America. Created over thousands of years by a now vanished culture, it represents the oldest art in California. Talking Stone: Rock Art of the Cosos explores the remote canyons and the mysteries surrounding these amazing images.

The film explores different methodologies for understanding rock art, through interviews with archaeologists, contemporary Native people, and extensive photography of the art itself.

Goldsmith's intriguing documentary, "Talking Stone: Rock Art of the Cosos" is a visually engaging example of ethnographic "multivocality" at its best. Unable to interview the creators of petroglyphs made thousands of years ago by the now-extinct Coso people, Goldsmith instead reveals what the mysterious images mean not only to Native Californians and archaeologists today, but to hunters, artists, clinical psychologists, and even to the U.S. Navy, on whose missile testing grounds the rock art now remains protected. "Talking Stone" should appeal to audiences of all ages, from elementary school children to adults, interested in Native American cultures, archaeology, rock art, and the desert environment of the American West.

–Nancy Lutkehaus, Ph.D., Co-Director, Center for Visual Anthropology, University of Southern California

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