The Lucy's Legacy Project--Institute of Human Origins and Donald C. Johanson Collection: Linking Public Humanities with a Public Understanding of Science

This project will develop provocative humanities-based questions to share about the origins of questions of what it means to be human and questions about the collection, how the materials support certain narratives attached to paleoanthropological pursuits, and how academic rivalries punctuate practice and fire the public imagination. Moreover, this project is the first step in analyzing, cataloguing, and preserving a collection of materials from a significant scientist and research institute that tell a story of the history of anthropology during the last quarter of the 20th century. The project will identify various ways of understanding what it means to collect, what the collection means, and begin a formal process to assess and inventory the collection in a systematic way so that it can be prepared and catalogued for long-term access by scholars, educators, and students and, for parts of the collection by the general public.

This project was sponsered by the Institute for Humanities Research.