haven’t been to the AMNH in ages so went while in NY and my review is: it sucks
was mostly in the American Indian and Pacific peoples halls and they mostly did the thing I hate of portraying indigenous history/culture as:
- this indigenous people did X (during what time period did they do X? unclear)
- then Europeans came and disrupted their traditional ways of life
with little acknowledgment that:
- these cultures were not static before Europeans came: there was history and dramatic change, technology evolved, empires rose and fell
- there was lots of migration and displacement before Europeans arrived, with later-arriving groups often coming into conflict with groups that were already there
- pre-European settlement had significant impacts on nature/the environment
sample explanations, paraphrased:
- “the Rapa Nui lived on Easter Island and built giant stone heads. in 1722, the arrival of Europeans disrupted their traditional way of life” (wait I think there was some other stuff in there)
- “the introduction of European horses allowed the Plains Indians to hunt bison much more effectively … [a few sentences later] unfortunately the overhunting of buffalo by the European settlers who moved west led to the diminishing of bison populations, threatening the Indian way of life” (I don’t even know what the breakdown of bison hunting was but like, it feels like there’s an inability to conceive that the increased capacity of the Indians to hunt bison might have contributed to the decrease in bison populations?)