The past is present

Mary Daily | February 13, 2025

Like the city of Los Angeles, UCLA has always been focused on the future. Discovery, innovation, risk-taking: All of these are driven by a quest to lead the world toward what’s next. In medicine, business, technology and the arts, our scholars, researchers and budding entrepreneurs reside on the cutting edge. New things start here.

Yet across campus, major programs are also devoted to preserving the past, to caring for and documenting what has come before so that we can better understand ourselves and what may lie ahead, while leaving a record for those who come after us. Cultural heritage is a timeless treasure, a window into our shared history; keeping it alive promotes diversity and fosters a sense of belonging.

The winter 2025 issue of UCLA Magazine highlights work by UCLA faculty and staff to preserve languages, films, art objects and cultural heritage. Among them are a trio of professors in the Humanities Division: Pamela Munro and Ben Eischens, both of the linguistics department, and Glenn Wharton of the art history department. Following are their parts of the story; visit the UCLA Magazine website to read the full feature.

Speaking up to save the world’s disappearing languages

Language communicates culture. Wisdom. Traditional knowledge and artistic expression of a people, place and time. When a language disappears, much disappears with it. Yet according to the United Nations, one of the world’s roughly 6,000 indigenous languages vanishes every two weeks. Databases of the languages of the world show the status of each.

“A language is endangered,” says UCLA linguistics professor emeritus Pamela Munro, “if it is losing speakers faster than it is gaining them — more speakers are dying than new speakers are being born and learning the language.” Some of the languages still being spoken are “critically endangered,” she says.

The fear is that eventually a language will not be spoken at all and, over time, not even remembered. Some may ask: So what? Here’s what: It’s a devastating loss for people whose heritage and ancestral knowledge are wrapped up in their native tongue.

In linguistic fieldwork, scholars document endangered languages with the assistance of native speakers if they can be located; if not, they lean into archival materials to develop educational tools and collect stories told in that language.

Munro, who studies Native American languages, has been most involved with the Chickasaw language, which is primarily spoken in Oklahoma. She works in collaboration with the Chickasaw Nation, one of the country’s largest tribes; with a co-author from the nation, she has published a grammar book and dictionary for educational use. She also studies several languages spoken in the Los Angeles area, including Garifuna, the tongue of the Garifuna people from Central America. She teaches a community class on Garifuna, using a book that grew out of one she wrote for a UCLA linguistics course.

Other UCLA faculty study languages in other parts of the world, such as Ghana and South Asia. Even lesser-studied languages have critical contributions to make to linguistic theory, says linguistics professor Ben Eischens, who studies San Martín Peras Mixtec, spoken in Western Oaxaca, Mexico, where Eischens frequently travels to work with native speakers. While the language is still spoken and taught, it’s threatened by a pattern of increasing bilingualism with Spanish and by its speakers’ migration to the U.S. and other parts of Mexico, since migrants tend to adopt the language of their new home.

Losing a language is not inevitable, Eischens says, but rather a case of “a non-immediate risk.” Which makes it critical to maintain and revitalize these endangered languages while we can if we are to hold onto the history and culture they carry.

Every object tells a story

Material culture encompasses the physical objects and artifacts of a society or group of people — what they produced and used in their daily lives. It is one of few sources for learning about a people, their habits and the time and place in which they lived. The objects include archaeological and indigenous material that may be sacred, utilitarian or fine art: a corroded bronze sculpture, a primitive tool, a broken piece of pottery, a frayed basket. Each carries an echo of the past, of a duty, service, ritual or task performed, over and over, through the decades and centuries. Each tells us a little bit about who the users were and how they lived.

But while material culture is a staple of various museums big and small, the study of the art of preserving such objects is scarce in the U.S. The UCLA/Getty Interdepartmental Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, established in 2004 in partnership with the Getty Conservation Institute, is the only academic program in the western U.S. devoted to education and training in conservation, and the only one in the nation dedicated to archaeological and indigenous materials.

“Because our focus is small,” says the program’s director, art historian and cultural materials conservator Glenn Wharton, “we can go deeper than institutions that have a broader scope.”

The three-year master’s program attracts students from around the world and trains them in the theory and practice of conservation, the challenges presented by climate change, and the signs that objects may have been acquired illegally. Their work is hands-on, with materials borrowed from museums and other collections in Southern California.

Laboratory courses are taught at the Getty Villa in Malibu, in facilities created especially for UCLA. Since 2019, the UCLA/Getty Program is one of only two conservation programs in the U.S. offering a Ph.D.

The program’s faculty have interdepartmental affiliations in art history, anthropology, information studies, and materials science and engineering. Because the program is embedded in the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, students also collaborate with scholars of the ancient world across the campus, researching collections from the Fowler Museum at UCLA — another major UCLA player in preservation — as well as from other collecting institutions, including those run by tribal nations. Working with community members, especially those from Indigenous groups, students learn cultural aspects of objects, which Wharton says may include continued use in ceremonies and ritual activities.

“That shifts how we think about preservation,” he says. “Collaborating with people whose cultures produced these objects expands what we can do. We engage stakeholders in constructing narratives about the past.”

The program is currently developing partnerships with African American community members, preserving their heirlooms and collecting the stories of their families and histories. “Then the goal of conservation,” he says, “becomes enabling people to connect with their pasts.”

Adapted from UCLA Magazine. Read the complete winter 2025 issue here.