For Immediate Release Contact: Pat Kremer (312) 665-7100 (For Media Use Only) The Ancient Americas A New Permanent Exhibition at The Field Museum Opens Friday, March 9, 2007 It’s the end of the last Ice Age, more than 13,000 years ago. Your small band of nomads has walked for many weeks, and you’re now on land that few people – if any – have seen before you. The glaciers have receded, but snow blankets the ground and a cold wind howls around you. Where will you find shelter? What will you eat? How will you live? The Ancient Americas, The Field Museum’s innovative new exhibition, is an exploration of the challenges that human beings everywhere have faced for millennia. It tells the epic story of human life on the American continents, from the arrival of small groups of hunter-gatherers, whose way of life survived into the 20th century, to the great but fragile empires of the Aztecs and the Incas – empires that stretched thousands of miles, encompassed as many as 10 million people, and came to sudden, brutal ends. Free listening posts throughout the exhibition offer gallery overviews in Spanish. Based on ground-breaking research by Field Museum scientists and others, The Ancient Americas will shatter long-held preconceptions. Visitors will see for themselves the intelligence and creativity that distinguish human beings, the innovations that allowed groups to diversify and populate the hemisphere from the Arctic to the tip of South America, and the great cities, trade networks, and sophisticated cultures built by Indigenous Peoples long before Europeans decimated their populations and imposed their own cultures on these lands. The Ancient Americas is made possible by the McCormick Tribune Foundation.  The Empire Builders Gallery is presented by the Abbott Fund. The Innovators Gallery is presented by ITW Foundation. A World Rich in People, Cultures, and Creativity Contemporary Americans recognize that their society is a tapestry of many cultures. But we tend to think of this mix as a recent development, the consequence of immigration in a highly mobile world. In The Ancient Americas, visitors will see that an astonishing diversity of peoples already were established in the Western hemisphere long before the Spanish arrived. Continue>>