From Dallas, I set off across southeastern Texas on my way towards New Orleans. Along the way, I stopped in Lufkin Texas for a brief and restorative visit to the Naranjo Museum of Natural History. In contrast to my other visits, the Naranjo did not advertise itself as a museum of Biblical Archaeology, nor did its subject matter focus on the Bible. The museum’s website did not mention ancient artifacts, and it took a phone call to confirm that such artifacts were on display. With all these differences, it’s no surprise that the Naranjo’s approach to the collection and display of ‘Holy Land’ artifacts differed from that of the other places I visited. Fascinatingly, and in contrast with my other visits to museum’s displaying artifacts from ancient Palestine, the museum’s small display of ‘biblical artifacts’ evoked notions of medieval relics and Cabinets of Curiosities. Since the origin and methodology employed to collect the museum’s artifacts from the ‘holy land’ are inextricably connected to my interpretation of their significance, I have decided to include information about the artifact’s origins in my general museum text as opposed to in a separate section.
History and Mission Statement:
The Naranjo Museum is an exhibition space built entirely around the personal collection of Dr. Neil Naranjo. Naranjo is a retired medical doctor whose hobbies include natural history, paleontology, and collecting. After inheriting a substantial family fortune, Naranjo used it to acquire a sizable collection of fossils, geological specimens, historical memorabilia, and a small number of antiquities. For many years, Naranjo’s collection was kept in his home and in a local warehouse until with the encouragement of his family, he decided to put his objects in a newly built museum which opened in 2011.
The museum is specifically geared towards children’s science education with readable displays, dioramas, and hands on activities. As the only natural history museum within an over 2 hour driving radius, the museum serves numerous local schools as well as a rural population who might ordinarily not have access to scientific museums. Despite not being close to a major destination city, the museum on occasion receives international visitors and has been featured on several road trip-oriented websites as an ideal and out there stop in eastern Texas. The Naranjo Museum’s collection covers the natural history specimens and artifacts from around the world with a focus on global natural history and dinosaurs.
The Museum:
The Naranjo Museum is impossible to miss, especially after driving down the relatively monotonous four lane state road it sits beside. The museum’s edifice copies its design elements from Classical Greek temples including ionic columns, pediments, and triglyphs. Its intentional evocation of ancient Greece is a bold appeal to associate the museum with the qualities the public at large associates with the Greeks of the 5th-3rd centuries BCE, i.e. rationality, humanism, knowledge, and truth. Equally visible was the museum’s mascot, a dinosaur wearing a cowboy hat and holding the flag of Texas. This of course begged the question of which came first, Texas or Dinosaurs?
Entering the museum, my expectations were immediately surpassed. In a high-ceilinged open area that more than anything else resembled an aircraft hanger with divider walls were numerous dioramic cases displaying species and fossils from successive geological eras. Each of the dioramas included a mural, some fossils, and a small number of full-sized rubber casts of species from that era. Each diorama also included a panel that concisely presented each period’s climate, atmosphere, fossil record, and life forms. The presentation of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods were particularly impressive featuring a series of full size casted-bone dinosaur replicas, large dioramas, and explanatory panels. In addition to its geologic history of the earth, the first room also included a moon rock collected during the Apollo 14 mission on loan from NASA, a broader section about space exploration, and a room containing jewels and gems.
Before continuing onto the museum’s second half, which included its antiquities, I returned to the front desk to ask the question that had been pulling at me since I arrived. In this part of the United States, rife with biblical literalism and evangelical zealousness didn’t the museum encounter any local hostility? According to the woman at the front desk, she had never heard of anyone taking offense at the museum or its scientific messages either for religious reasons or otherwise. She added that she herself was religious and told me that in her view God had created dinosaurs in the distant past, but had decided to start over, causing various cataclysms and guiding the rise of humanity. It went to show that as an outsider both to this part of the United States and to evangelical culture at large, it’s all too easy to transform a community, city, or region into a monolith. I should also say that the idea of a divine force having some influence on creation or larger trends in evolution is an idea I’ve encountered in my own Jewish community where I’ve heard some suggest that the creation account in Genesis 1, if interpreted in a particular way, echoes what science reveals about the evolution of the earth and universe.
The second half of the museum dealt with more recent geological periods focusing on the rise of mammals and leading to humans and human cultures. In the framework of a natural history museum presenting a global history, humans and human cultures are considered part of the same long story of planet earth and therefore should be displayed and discussed alongside more distant lifeforms. By contrast with the earlier exhibitions where linear time had been the guiding principle, the human cultures display was made up of 6 double-sided glass cabinets with a series of shelves containing a huge and eclectic variety of archaeological and historical objects from many time periods and from all over the world. These cases included Native artifacts from ancient Ohio, ancient Native pottery fragments from the Southwest, ethnographic Native American objects from eastern North America, replica fossilized skulls from ancient Hominids, a section on the history of barbed wire, civil and revolutionary war memorabilia and artifacts, Medieval European weapons, and much more. Sitting between groups of purchased and replica antiquities from ancient Egypt and Rome was the reason I had come to the museum in the first place, the Naranjo’s collection of antiquities from ancient Palestine.
A cursory glance at this case revealed that the Naranjo’s collection was made up of a small number of complete objects complemented by well over 100 ceramic fragments. Looking closer at the ceramic sherds, I noticed tiny labels indicating the object’s sites of origin and mostly inaccurate rough dates. In the case were ceramic fragments from Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Nazareth, Jericho, Capernaum, Caesarea, the purported location of the Sermon on the Mount near the Sea of Galilee, Megiddo, Beth Shean, and a few specific religious sites in Jerusalem. In addition to the pottery sherds the assortment of objects included a small number of random stones from sites like Mt. Carmel, the Western Wall, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Those who have been on a guided tour of Israel, and especially a religiously affiliated one will recognize that these are the very sites commonly visited by busses of pilgrims as they make their way through the Holy Land, following in the footsteps of the Bible’s characters.
With this in mind and looking at the sherds, it became evident that these objects almost entirely came from the littered surfaces of the parts of these sites open to tourists. They had not been selected, but rather had been picked up randomly. Piecing together exactly how the objects were collected, it became clear to me, that at some point in the past, Naranjo had gone on a religiously affiliated trip to Israel. At each stop, he stepped off the bus, likely went on a guided tour of a site, and before leaving made sure to pick up a few pieces of pottery or any other residue he found on the site’s surface as a memento of his visit. This pattern of collecting was confirmed by looking at the museum’s fragmentary objects from ancient Rome and Greece which time and time again were labelled as ‘found by Neal Naranjo.’ In no instance were these fragments accompanied by explanatory signage or greater archaeological context, the only information available on them was their site of origin, and rough date, which in all cases was either tied to a biblical time period, or to a specific biblical figures.
Such displays are hardly new and even less so in the case of objects from the Holy Land. For as long as Palestine has held that designation, Christian pilgrims have travelled to visit the locations of miracles and other biblical events as a means of confirming and strengthening their faith. In the very theory of there being a specifically Holy Land is the idea that holiness is transmittable and resonates in particular locations long after the events that established them as holy transpired. This theory of Holy essence goes beyond places and also exists for things. Early European pilgrims returned from Palestine with the supposed bones of saints, pieces of the original cross, fragments of Christ’s hair, and more. Throughout the Middle Ages, these objects were placed in churches where they themselves become venerated objects worthy of pilgrimage. Relics in effect then were portable manifestations of the Holy Land’s holy essence/substance.
While relic collecting today is no longer a focus for organized Christianity at large, the purchase or collection of parts of the Holy Land is still a common activity for pilgrims. Jerusalem’s tourist shops even today are filled with vials containing soil, rocks, oil, and water from the Holy Land that can be sent around the world as an opportunity to transmit the holy essence of Palestine. Certain spots are replete with this kind of collecting. As I learned during my travels related to this blog, the Elah Valley, the place where David is held to have fought Goliath is commonly combed by Christian pilgrims for stones to take home. Such stones appeared both at the Linda Byrd Smith Museum of Biblical Archaeology and the Tandy Museum.
Though true that the objects at the Naranjo are not viewed as religious objects worthy of veneration in an organized religious setting, in their museum setting they can carry out many of the same tasks acting as modern-day relics. Though pilgrimage is a far more accessible activity than it was in the Medieval Period, it remains the case that most Christians will likely never visit Palestine. As such, many places for them continue only to exist on the pages of the Bible. For these people, the opportunity to see physical byproducts of the Holy Land and all of its pilgrimage locations can serve as a confirmation of faith. They establish the antiquity of the land relative to the events purported in the Bible. While an argument could be made that the pottery fragments possess some relation to the broader theme of human cultures meant to be on display, the various pebbles and even a piece of olivewood from the location of the Sermon on the Mount also on display suggest a deeper and partially religiously motivated bias. While true that for believers all archaeological objects from this part of the world might take on this type of significance, when such objects are displayed alongside signage and with an explicated archaeological significance related to the people of the past, their cultural significance comes into far sharper focus.
The collection’s remaining artifacts from the Holy Land consisted of a small number of arrowheads, coins, six complete pottery vessels, and two ancient oil lamps. As discussed in previous postings, the global art and antiquities market is replete with artifacts flowing out of Israel due to the country’s liberal export laws. The openness of these laws mean that artifacts can be sold on third party websites including eBay. That the complete objects in the Naranjo had their origin on eBay was suggested by their tags, which mimic the descriptions given to objects sold on eBay. It is worth noting that in all cases, these objects have a general and unreliable provenance, either Jerusalem, or the Holy Land at large. Similarly, the objects are roughly dated to as wide a timespan as possible, with the intention of matching them up to the lifetime of a specific biblical figure. For example, two of the objects in the collection were labeled as from the time of Moses. These sorts of generalizations both of provenance and time period are endemic in the Israeli Antiquities trade which to this day is still a conduit by which illegally looted objects become legitimate and exportable art objects.
Conclusion: The Collector and his Cabinet of Curiosities
Walking around the various disordered cases of Dr. Naranjo’s antiquities, time and time again, I found myself reminded of Cabinets of Curiosities and the early museums of the 19th century. The term Cabinet of Curiosities refers to a type of collection display common between the 16th and 19th centuries in which landed European individuals would place a random assortment of exotic and eclectic objects inside of a display case inside their home. These cabinets grew directly out of the age of exploration and classification in which Europeans travelled the globe bringing back objects and specimens from the places they visited and colonized. At the same time, through classification, the previously unknown world order was for the first time conceptualized through a series of organizational frameworks that rendered the world understandable. The personal Cabinet of Curiosities was an extension of these broader developments in which individuals could appropriate these broader scientific discoveries for the purposes of personal social capital. If the scientific process rendered the world understandable, having parts of that global evidence would serve to present those object’s owners as possessors of that understanding, who could share it with those who observed their objects. The primary shortcoming of this approach however was that it provided only a surface level view of complicated natural and cultural landscapes. Entire groups of people were summarized by sets of objects valued for being wonders and curiosities, illustrations of the size and strangeness of the world, rather than objects used for inquiry, or for developing deep understandings of other cultures.
The Human Cultures section at the Naranjo museum is a modern-day cabinet of curiosities. While its objects are put together based on their geographic origin, without the benefit of additional information and with its numerous fragmentary objects, the Naranjo’s artifacts remain amorphous curiosities and relics that can be interpreted however a visitor wishes. Though the Naranjo importantly provides an opportunity for local people to see ancient objects in their own community, it is my hope that in time, the museum affords greater attention to its human cultures section, transforming its objects from relics and curiosities, to objects of genuine scientific interest that tell the stories of the people who made and used them. The archaeology of ancient Palestine has been in constant development for over 150 years. While the earliest collectors of artifacts from Palestine imaginatively assigned their objects religious importance, today, enough is known that every single object has the capability to tell an amazingly rich story. By putting the people back into these objects, with some effort, the Naranjo museum has the tremendous potential to tell a global story of human culture and diversity. With the overarching quality of the museum’s other sections, I know that this goal is entirely achievable.
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