hanwDESMA9: Event 3 | Natural History Museum

Event 3 | Natural History Museum | Dinosaur and Maya

The natural history museum of Los Angeles is located beside University of Southern California, and the museum presents variety of exhibitions range from dinosaurs time till the history of Los Angeles. The museum consists of different categories of exhibitions, from large mammals to insects, from ancient Maya civilization to the contemporary history of California. The Maya exhibition and the newly decorated dinosaurs hall clearly defined two basic categories of history, namely human civilization and animal evolution.

The Maya exhibition represented art works from Maya culture, which is originated around 3,000 years ago at Yucatan, Southern Mexico and Honduras. The Maya culture established writing systems and the culture is eventually collapsed due to draught and perhaps economic pressure. A large portion of portraits are exhibited, which clearly described the daily life of Maya people and the corresponding religion. For instance, a weaver figure is represented. It’s a ceramic art work made around A.D. 600-900 in Mexico and depicts daily life of a weaver in Maya society; and the weaving technique is still applied in Mexico. By inspecting variety of art pieces within that period of time, it’s becoming more obvious that the art is universal. Each civilization in the history contains certain kinds of portraits about the daily life in terms of art. On one hand, it could be summarized that art is the nature of human beings and is carried all the way from the start of civilization; on the other hand, there is similarities between different civilizations, as the human portraits from Maya is similar to the figures discovered in China; and thus proved that art is universal.

The dinosaur hall represented skeletons of dinosaurs from Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, and the scale of the skeletons range from tiny bird size to huge building size. It’s surprising and shaking to see the completeness of the skeletons and how real the simulations are. And all the visual impression made me think about the technology that helped excavating, protecting and simulating all these dinosaurs’ skeletons. The movie Jurassic Park is one of the typical example that assemble the history, art and technology. The advanced technologies helped us better understanding the nature of the world and the civilizations that are essential to us. Technologies created art pieces that could not be done without these techniques.