ECC Anthropology Museum

Boy, here's one I really didn't see comin'!!! I went for a bike ride at the end of May, taking along my new $25 camcorder to capture a fast climb up one of the steepest roads in the neighborhood (the southern end of Crenshaw Blvd.), & do some test recordings while climbing the Culver City Stairs.

First stop, however, was in response to a flyer in the mail for El Camino College, announcing a new exhibit for their Anthropology Museum: "Motherland of Religions: The Eastern Mediterranean in Late Prehistory".

"The ECC Anthropology Museum's latest exhibit explores the birth of the three great world religions. ... The exhibit is the first in the newly renovated museum, financed by the 2002 facilities bond. New cases constructed in mahogany and tempered glass were built for the space, and moveable wall panels were added so the museum's layout can be reconfigured for each exhibit."

I like humans, so I figured I drop in, give it a once-over, & be back on my bike in about 10 minutes total.

YIKES!!! THEY HAD ARTIFACTS FROM HEBRON ON DISPLAY!!! Talk about serendipity! Several days earlier Aren Maeir had posted a blog entry about Prof. Jeff Chadwick's AEH Publication Project! So I decided to make a quick walk-thru video of the exhibit because I knew he'd want to see the objects, & I was curious how they came to be at USC (as stated on their accompanying placards).

But as I began recording & walked into the room, a student sitting near the door immediately asked me if I was an Anthro major. This surprised me because I thought the exhibit was open to the public, & expected that the student was going to tell me it was closed or off-limits, or that cameras weren't allowed. Instead, he asked me a sincere anthropological (actually biological) question! I captured the whole 2-minute interaction on video, & posted it in the spirit of Robert Cargill's video of Omer Sergi giving an impromptu field-lecture on LMLK seals:



I ended up spending a half-hour going quickly over the whole exhibit, but later when I got home & reviewed the footage, I could not clearly read the placards, & saw something bizarre: a paper Hebrew scroll, allegedly being a DSS replica, but with a backwards section. I asked about this on Yahoo's Biblicalist, & received offline replies from 2 of the moderators, which were in agreement with private responses I received from a Hebrew-literate friend (& more-Hebrew-literate wife) in Boston, as well as from Robert Deutsch.

It turns out that the scroll is neither from the Hebrew OT, nor from the Essene literature; in fact it doesn't even appear to be Hebrew at all, but randomly constructed words:

So I went back last week to re-record the exhibit. This time I spent over an hour doing it (even got to hear several LMLK VIPs on a TV playing in the background [Barkay, Vaughn, Stager, Tappy, McCarter]), & have been transcribing the placards for the convenience of viewers. Lo & behold, I was shocked to discover multiple typos throughout the museum, upside-down DSS photos, pro-Islamic content, & almost no Christian content whatsoever (read again the quotation from the flyer that the exhibit allegedly "explores the birth of three" religions).

The edited video is now online at YouTube. It's 44 minutes long, but I made each placard's duration 4 seconds so that you can pause the video to read it. I also added comments refuting Evolutionism, & poked fun at the Islamic garbage (in the spirit of Elijah per 1Kings 18:27, making some of the funniest remarks in the entire Bible). Here's a complete overview:

0:00 - 7:40 Neanderthals vs. modern humans via Israeli caves

7:40 - 11:20 Evolutionism, the fairytale about primates

11:20 - 11:35 Snippet of Bill Dever on NOVA about Yahweh+Asherah

11:35 - 12:40 Museum overview inside

12:40 - 13:25 Khirbet el-Kom jar

13:25 - 14:05 Excavation Quadrant Model

14:05 - 16:50 Eating with the Egyptians, photos from Faiyum

16:50 - 23:50 Canaanite/Israelite pottery

23:50 - 27:10 Jaffa, Roman Hellenistic pottery, Greek/Roman/Jewish coins

27:10 - 27:50 Roman amphora from shipwreck

27:50 - 30:05 Hebron & other Israeli stone/metal artifacts

30:05 - 34:45 Islamic tripe; no artifacts, just political propaganda

34:45 - 41:05 Dead Sea Scrolls; photos only

41:05 - 43:30 Gobekli Tepe Temple; photos & model

43:30 - 43:58 closing info about me

Altogether if you pause to read everything, it'll take about 2 hours.  Don't blink or you'll miss the birth of Christianity.



G.M. Grena