Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: Papers of John P. Harrington Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection Author: Johnson, Miller & Agren Source(s): Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History # of Pages: 12 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-08-30 13:56:17 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 05:50:04 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 05:50:04

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

Page: of 12  

1991 JOHN R. JOHNSON, AMY MILLER, AND LINDA AGREN 369 the Museum sought funding for further organization of the Harrington collection as part of a larger proposed project that encompassed the overall management of the Museum archives. Unfortunately, attempts to secure grant support were unsuccessful. Hudson’s untimely death in 1985 and plans for the anthropology department to move to a new facility further delayed archival work with the collection until fall 1991. In November 1991, the authors began to inventory and sort material contained in the thirty boxes. The remainder of this paper is devoted to a detailed description of their contents (Mills et al. 1989; Mills and Mills 1991). Ethnographic and linguistic papers A detailed inventory of Harrington’s ethnographic and linguistic papers (six boxes) is nearly complete. The papers, which were thoroughly mixed despite the preliminary sorting by Travis Hudson, are currently being organized according to the same categories and method of arrangement used by Harrington project editor Elaine Mills for the Smithsonian’s microfilm publication of Harrington’s notes (Mills 1981, 1985, 1988; Mills and Brickfield 1986a, 1986b, 19874, 1987b). Researchers who expect major troves of missing portions of Harrington's field notes among this material will be disappointed. Much of the collection consists of transcripts or photostats, notes from his library research, and drafts of papers he later published or intended to publish. Among miscellaneous items are lecture notes and exams for courses that Harrington taught in Colorado and San Diego, California, and papers from some of his own college course work in linguistics. It is important to note that there are some surprising tidbits here and there that relate to primary ethnographic and linguistic research. The linguistic material consists of odds and ends of data from a number of different groups, mostly from California, but it also includes data on Kiowa, Pueblo, Mayan, and Arabic languages, among others. In terms of volume and research importance, the Chumash papers in the collection may be the most significant. For example, Harrington’s original handwritten notes from Fernando Librado, recorded in 1912-13, are present in their original order of elicitation. These notes were later extracted by Harrington and typed for inclusion in his slip files. It has been the slip files, rather than the original manuscripts, that have formed the basis for our present understanding of Chumash traditional history and ceremonial practices as reconstructed in such publications as Eye of the Flute and Breath of the Sun (Hudson et al. 1977; Hudson 1979). The original order and form of these notes will help to shed light on whether meanings have been misunderstood or information lost between the time of Harrington’s interviews with Librado and when the various extracted slips were recombined for publication more than sixty years later. ,