ICFA Launches its Oral History Initiative

The Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives (ICFA) at Dumbarton Oaks is pleased to announce the online publication of our Oral History Initiative: http://www.doaks.org/icfa/oral-history-initiative. Continue reading →

ICFA wins the 2014 MARAC Finding Aid Award!

ICFA is proud to announce that The Byzantine Institute and Dumbarton Oaks Fieldwork Records and Papers, ca. late 1920s-2000s finding aid has been awarded the 2014 Frederic M. Miller Finding Aid Award by the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC). On April 26, 2014, during the Spring 2014 MARAC conference in Rochester, NY, ICFA’s Archivist Rona Razon received the 2014 … Continue reading →

Saving the World, Part I: Dumbarton Oaks to Monuments Men

Written by Ameena Mohammad, Pre-Columbian Archives Assistant Dumbarton Oaks was founded in 1940 as a hub for advanced research. In October 1941,  staff members and fellows of  Dumbarton Oaks established an immense research project to gather information about cultural heritage sites around the world.  What began as an effort to document these monuments is now part … Continue reading →

The Chrysanthemum is Ready for Her Close-Up

This is a guest post from Dr. Robin Veder, Associate Professor of Humanities and Art History/Visual Culture at Penn State Harrisburg and a former Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. She recently published “Walking through Dumbarton Oaks: Early Twentieth-Century Bourgeois Bodily Techniques and Kinesthetic Experience of Landscape” in the Journal of the … Continue reading →

“Earthquakes and war they have survived…”

Thomas Whittemore was an impressive person. The previous blog posts “The Leading Protagonist: Thomas Whittemore” and “Setting the Stage: Background on the Byzantine Institute” describe his grand project with the Byzantine Institute to restore, preserve, and document Byzantine monuments and how skilled he was in collecting funds for both humanitarian work and the restoration of Hagia … Continue reading →

Introducing ICFA’s 16mm Film Collection

Written by Fani Gargova, Byzantine Research Associate Edited by Rona Razon, Archivist The Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives (ICFA) proudly presents the first online release of fourteen (14) moving images from its film collection, which have not been available to an audience outside of Dumbarton Oaks for the past 60 years. First, ICFA holds unique … Continue reading →

New Finding Aids from ICFA

The Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives (ICFA) is pleased to announce the publication of four new finding aids on the department’s archival collections webpage. ICFA staff completed the archival processing and finding aids for the following collections: Thomas Whittemore Papers, ca. 1875-1966 Early Archaeological Projects Associated with Thomas Whittemore, 1910s-1930s Byzantine Institute and Dumbarton Oaks … Continue reading →

Size and Scale

Written by Jessica Cebra, ICFA Departmental Assistant Measuring tools are essential to archaeological surveys, excavations, and other kinds of fieldwork. Measurements not only lend themselves to the documentation process, but offer a sense of scale to those who did not see the object or site in person. Amongst the images of scaffolding, trenches, and crumbling … Continue reading →

“Non-textual materials”

Written by: Jessica Cebra, ICFA Intern Photographic negatives present many unique challenges to arranging an archival collection of photographic materials. A photograph is an inherently problematic document type containing multiple layers of meaning by which it can be described. An archivist must keep in mind the person, group, or organization responsible for the creative activity that … Continue reading →

Artamonoff’s Photographic Puzzle

Written by Aly DesRochers, ICFA Intern The Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives at Dumbarton Oaks holds (among other things) thousands of photographs from Byzantine sites throughout the world.  Most of these have been catalogued, printed and made available for researchers. But our archive still holds some mysteries amid its shelves and cold storage freezers. One such … Continue reading →