With the statement that “Feathers are held in the global imagination as synonymous with Indians” (1), conservator Ellen Pearlstein opens the volume, and recent exhibitions on Central and South American featherwork in Paris and Vancouver prove the veracity of the author's claim. The book's introductory essays are followed by six case studies on the conservation of Brazilian, Mexican, and Peruvian featherwork held in the collections of the Fowler Museum of the University of California, Los Angeles.
The volume will undoubtedly influence researchers from a variety of disciplines in their future treatment of feathered items from the Americas. Addressing a variety of different audiences, the book will certainly spur new cross-disciplinary approaches in research on material culture in general and American featherwork in particular. It is clear from their work that the editor, and collectively the authors, have a wide audience in mind: conservators, museologists, archaeologists, and historians alike.
The volume takes up and expands on recent discussions among conservators and museologists about the conservation treatment and display of feathers. Preventive conservation, for example, protecting the feathers from insects and mechanical damage and the preserving their coloration, is as much debated as the difficulties and implications of cleaning, reshaping, realigning, mending, and compensating for lost feathers. The volume formulates pressing issues regarding the preparation of exhibitions, among them display lighting, legal protection, gendered handling, and questions of repatriation and goes on to offer practical guidance. Pearlstein's “ground-breaking work using non-destructive ultraviolet illumination as an aid to feather identification” (x) will have a considerable impact on the field, as will her exemplary feather identification and condition template that serves the nuanced and detailed recording of the conservation of featherwork.
Of particular interest to the readers of this journal, the authors emphasize the significance of conservation work for the research of archaeologists and historians of material culture. Conservation practices have a huge impact on the possibilities of the reconstruction of cultural meanings; both the volume introduction and its case studies show the degree to which historians of material culture rely on conservation practices. The conservator's work, above all, reveals the deliberate choices of indigenous craftsmen regarding materials, as well as the techniques of and process of creating featherwork, all of which hint at the cultural meanings of such objects. Pearlstein aims “to demonstrate how the technical information on featherwork recorded by conservators can form a significant basis for research and interpretation by featherworkers, and by scholars” (1).
The authors definitely succeed in showing that the detailed recording of conservation work is an essential tool for a historian's research on indigenous featherwork as, “feather selection and use, as well as trimming and attaching, provides meaningful interpretative evidence” (3). Precisely because Pearlstein's template represents a new standard in conservation work, and thus opens new lines of interpretation for historians who research the topic, one might wish for more detailed cultural biographies of the case studies’ objects. In addition, the limited variety of samples available in the online databases conservators use to identify feathers points a basic difficulty: how, on one hand, to reflect on historical migration patterns of birds, and on the other, on the exchange of feathers among indigenous communities in pre-Colombian and colonial times.
There is much current historiographical debate on cultures of making, and this richly illustrated volume increases our awareness of how indigenous working methods produced the desired outcomes of material manufacturing. Given the ethnohistorical significance of these artifacts, the volume has a dual relevance to historians: to demonstrate the value of craft expertise in history (indigenous featherworkers) and today (conservators’ “treatment experience and experimentation” [14]) for the preservation and accessibility of material heritage. The historian's craft, and attempts to reconstruct the material worlds of the Americas, rely on appreciating the skills of makers and cooperating with makers new and old.
