First Person: Relics vs. “Real” Archaeology

Home > Magazines > BAR > May/June 2012

After President Lincoln was assassinated, his wife requested a lock of his hair. Others soon made the same request. So his physician clipped a number of small locks of the deceased president’s hair. According to a Washington Post article, one of these locks of hair, the size of an eyebrow, was recently donated to a Gettysburg museum.1 The estimated worth is between $30,000 and $50,000. The superintendent of the park is quoted as saying, “This is one of those special objects that gives you the chills when you see it.” Not to some highfalutin professional archaeologists. Relics have a […]

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Endnotes

Michael E. Ruane, “Gettysburg Gets a Lock of Lincoln’s Hair,” Washington Post, July 1, 2011.

“On Archaeology, Forgeries and Public Awareness: The ‘James Brother of Jesus’ Ossuary in Retrospect,” Bible and Interpretation, March 2011 (www.bibleinterp.com/articles/archfor358014.shtml).

Ryan Byrne and Bernadette McNary-Zak, Resurrecting the Brother of Jesus: The James Ossuary Controversy and the Quest for Religious Relics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), p. 26.

Avraham Faust, “The Interests of the Assyrian Empire in the West: Olive Oil Production as a Test-Case,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 54 (2011), p. 62.