Elizabeth Carmichael obituary | English Museum

In 1991, anthropologist Elizabeth Carmichael, who died aged 84, was the British Museum’s curator of an exhibition that sparked interest in the spectacular and varied Mexican tradition of remembering the dead during the feast of All Saints, welcoming souls with their families. . Different communities have done this in different ways, but always with love and even with joy.

The Skeleton at the Feast: The Day of the Dead in Mexico, which ran for two years at the Museum of Mankind in central London, marked the culmination of several years of research and fieldwork in Mexico by Liz and her colleague Chloë Sayer exploring the variety and uniqueness of these traditions. They scoured the markets and neighborhoods of Mexico City and far beyond, often in remote towns and villages, discovering the best craftsmen, seeking information and gathering materials that characterize different approaches to the festival. Their finds included intricate ceramic sculptures, intricate hand-cut paper images, wire and papier-mâché skeletons galore, palm fronds, pottery incense burners and much more, qu they bought on the markets or commissioned from the artists they met. Fragile ephemera such as sugar skulls were equally lovingly collected and carefully wrapped, wrapped in roll-on-roll toilet paper.

All of this culminated in the largest exhibition on the festival held outside of Mexico, and it amazed and delighted the public who saw it. The recognition he gave to individual Mexican artisans, some of whom came to the museum to show off their craftsmanship in workshops and demonstrations, fostered a greater and lasting respect for their work. It helped raise awareness of the richness and importance of Mexican traditions more generally, and the resulting book continues to be a reference text. It is partly for this reason that the British Museum now has a permanent Mexican gallery.

Born in Ilford, then Essex, Liz was the third child of Eva (née Aitken) and Daniel Carmichael. During the war, the family moved to East Ham so his father could be within cycling distance of his job as an electrical engineer in the London docks. From East Ham Girls’ High School, she went to Newnham College, Cambridge to study English. After a year, she switched to archeology and anthropology, graduating in 1960. At the time, the course contained no specialization in the Americas, but the curator of the University Museum of Archeology and in ethnology, Geoffrey Bushnell, an Americanist with a particular interest in Ecuador, encouraged her to take an interest in this part of the world.

In 1961 Liz joined the ethnography department of the British Museum, part of a group of pioneering women entering the museum professions, and eventually became responsible for all of the Americas. Nine years later, under Bill Fagg, the department was moved and renamed the Museum of Humanity to a building in Burlington Gardens (now the northern part of the Royal Academy), where there was ample space to offer in-depth presentations of cultures from around the world with long-term exhibitions and accompanying publications.

There, Liz curated the first gallery dedicated to Aztec turquoise mosaic pieces. His detailed and thought-provoking book Turquoise Mosaics from Mexico (1970) was followed by a major exhibition entitled The Maya, the first for the British Museum. Part of the exhibition, accompanied by Carmichael’s book The British and the Maya (1973), brought to life the contributions of British explorers and scholars who had done such extraordinary work in this field, including Alfred Maudslay, Adela Breton, Ian Graham and Norman Hammond. The exhibition not only featured well-known Mayan pieces such as the superb 8th century carved stone lintels from the Maya city of Yaxchilán, the stone corn god (AD715) from Copán and the beautifully painted vase of a ruler Maya receiving tribute, from Nebaj, Guatemala (AD600-800), but also less familiar, but equally important Maya pieces, such as the remarkable Maya ceramic incense burners from the late Postclassic period (AD1200-1500) collected in Belize by Thomas Gann.

While Liz carried out archaeological field research in Belize, the Caribbean and Ecuador, her greatest strength lay in the development of an entirely new area of ​​research and collecting by the British Museum related to indigenous peoples and contemporary contemporaries. metis Latin American cultures, and she was able to focus more on that part of the world when a separate curator for North America was appointed. In 1985, she organized a major exhibition and published a book, Hidden Peoples of the Amazon.

In an effort to expand and enrich the museum’s representation of today’s cultures, she led a number of scholars and travelers to carry out fieldwork and build collections throughout Latin America. The years leading up to his retirement in 1997 were largely devoted to preparations for the department’s return to the main site of the British Museum in Bloomsbury, which took place that year.

Liz was the curator par excellence. His colleague John Picton described his unrivaled skill in handling rare, precious, and delicate things, and his “encyclopedic knowledge of the whole of the Americas, with a firm grip on the intellectual merits of various disciplinary arguments and controversies.” I remembered being impressed by his ability to “read the story” of the object in his hand. This was especially true when examining an uneventful artifact brought in for identification. More often than not, she could quickly specify its provenance and age, describe the peculiarities of its manufacture and connect iconographic details to give meaning to the whole.

His interests and knowledge were seemingly limitless in the arts, music, cooking and all things gardening. A friend described her as “this petite, energetic, insanely talented, prickly, cat-loving, totally individual person”.

She met Tony Kitzinger in 1966 while they both worked at the British Museum and they finally formally married in 2003. He and the younger of his two brothers survive him.