Logan Museum Alum Documentary Screening

By VIVIAN KOPKA

The Logan Museum hosted alum and archeologist Michael Tarabulski’81 on Friday, Sept. 19, for his two documentary screenings at the “Reliving the Past” gallery. 

The event and the gallery is in celebration of 100 years of the anthropology department at Beloit, established in 1925. 

The first film was nearly an hour long and recounted the 1930 Beloit expedition to Algeria, led by Alonzo Pond’1918, called “Reliving the Past: Alonzo Pond and the 1930 Logan African Expedition,” released in 1986. This was one of the handful of exhibitions to Algeria in the 1920s and 30s, and the first exhibition where undergraduate and graduate students attended. 

An array of alumni attended the event, many of whom recognized their professors from the 1985 interviews, gasping and ah-ing at seeing their late professors reanimated in film. 

Tarabulski spent a lot of his time in undergraduate and postgraduate collecting information and archiving the expedition and Alonzo Pond. He interviewed Pond in 1984 for the first film, and interviewed other professors and students at the 1985 Beloiter Days, the 60th anniversary of the anthropology department. 

The following film was shorter, and it was about “Count” Byron Khun de Prorok, an infamous name in archeology.  The film, called “A Tether to Romance: Byron de Prorok and the Tomb of Tin Hinan,” is focused on de Prorok and the Tomb of Tin Hinan, which was dug up in 1925. De Prorok was famous for his tall tales of searching for a “lost civilization.” He was one of many pseudo-anthropologists that believed in a lost city of Atlantis, a white civilization in the East.

 He toured the world giving lectures, while having no professional training in anthropology or archaeology. Nikita Werner, curator of the exhibit, compared de Prorok to a version of today’s influencer, getting content and exaggerating for profit. Tarabulski compared him to George Santos. He made the documentary for the D.C. American Anthropology Association. 

De Prorok joined Alonzo Pond’s 1925 exhibition to Algeria, as the French government only allowed one team to conduct digs. His book “Mysterious Sahara” is a sensational account of the exhibition. 

Tarabulski credits Pond for his interest in archaeology and archiving the past. He’s interested in what people leave behind, and the passing of time. “We’re all here just so briefly,” he expressed. Saving information and preserving history, he says, anyone can be a “king for a day,” quoting the 1928 Lewis and Olsen song — which Pond brought on one of the Algerian expeditions. 

_{Featured image: Vivian Kopka’27}