With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Martha Macri will continue work on the J. P. Harrington Database Project, transcribing and coding the linguistic and ethnographic notes on American Indian languages collected by J. P. Harrington during the first half of the twentieth century. The men and women he interviewed were often among the last speakers of their languages. During the 1980s, Harrington's original handwritten field notes, currently housed in the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution, were microfilmed, resulting in 477 reels from which the J. P. Harrington Database is being created. This project focuses first on the California notes and includes some languages of Oregon, Nevada, and parts of Washington.
Harrington's notes are being transcribed and coded for several linguistic and ethnographic categories. The notes can be printed from the database, and the possibilities for generating lexical lists and other useful data are virtually endless. Increased access to this enormous resource is of value to linguists, biologists, anthropologists, historians, geographers, and archaeologists. Perhaps its greatest value is to Native American community scholars for use in cultural and language revitalization, as well as for documentation of tribal histories and genealogies. It is invaluable to those studying the many languages of California, and their complex historical relationships. The project anticipates, and indeed depends on, the combined efforts of the academic community and native scholars currently engaged in the study of the languages and cultures recorded by Harrington.
