At the Museums	Volume 54 Number 3, May/June 2001

Finds from ancient Paris go on view

Food, fashion, and, now, archaeology. Leave it to Parisians to display their past with a sense of style befitting the City of Light. More than 6,000 years of city history have just gone on view in a stunning new presentation housed in a seventeenth-century orangerie at the Carnavalet Museum in the heart of the Marais District. Some 350 objects, the majority of which have been excavated by the Commission du Vieux Paris during the past three decades, are presented.

Nicole Provost Logan has written on archaeology in Russia and the Middle East.

For conceptual artist Patrick Nagatani, the world's most famous archaeological sites provide just the right backdrop for the excavations of the peripatetic Ryoichi, an imaginary archaeologist whose "discoveries" have included a Jaguar XJS embedded in the foundation of the Observatory at the Late Classic Maya (A.D. 600-900) site of Chichén Itzá and a Ferrari in the volcanic ash of Herculaneum, destroyed in the A.D. 79 eruption of Vesuvius. These and other startling automobile deposits are documented in a series of photographic vignettes in the Ryoichi/Nagatani Excavations, an exhibition which debuted at the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography in Tucson and will soon travel to university museums around the country. For more information, log on to www.curatorial.org/travel/travelDocs/nagatani.html

Click here for ARCHAEOLOGY's list of current exhibitions.

© 2001 by the Archaeological Institute of America archive.archaeology.org/0105/abstracts/museum.html