Date:

September 8th, 2006

This is for my MDAH friends, provided any of you still read here. Imagine my shock, when catching up on blogs last night I read this Making Light entry, all about Mann’s book 1491 (which sounds like a good book, and I want to read it), and I get to this big blockquote with the following line in it : “In the view of Ramenofsky and Patricia Galloway, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, the source of the contagion was very likely not Soto’s army but its ambulatory meat locker…”

Reading that line made me see Pat’s contagious smile, her fluttering hands, her intensely interested eyes right there explaining how de Soto’s pigs had wiped out the Mississipi Valley civilizations. Wow.

I remembered that exhibit she’d worked on in the Old Capitol, with the funeral pyres. Do you remember the room with the jars of marbles? That was a simple display that elucidated holocaust and stunned me when I saw it.

She is one smart lady, and I’m glad when she turns up in places I didn’t expect to find her.

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