A pair of anniversary celebrations doubled the usual Sunday attendance at the state’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and Laboratory of Anthropology.

Some 1,000 visitors watched tribal dances and explored hidden collections stored in the basement at one of the top centers nationally for the study of human history in the Southwest. Museum director Shelby Tisdale said the 80-year-old state-owned research institution continues to dispel myths about the area’s oldest cultural groups, while assisting scholars who dig through the past in search of knowledge that might help humans navigate future perils.

“I think it’s just part of human curiosity (to wonder) where did we come from, how did we get here,” said Tisdale, who mentioned that the museum and lab typically get 500 visitors on a Sunday.

Since 1927, when the lab was incorporated with financial assistance from John D. Rockefeller, the lab has collected more than 10 million artifacts, including all antiquities collected on state-owned lands in New Mexico. As many as 100 scholars from around the world now use the lab’s archives, libraries and collections each month, Tisdale said.

The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, which opened 20 years ago, houses public displays of portions of the laboratory’s vast collection. Today, the museum holds about 75,000 items, Tisdale said.

“Like all good museums, about 80 percent of the collection is buried downstairs,” said docent Ron Klein, a retired attorney who has served as a museum trustee for the past 10 years.

On Sunday, free reservations for 16 limited-access tours of the hidden collections were spoken for within the first half-hour of the anniversary celebration. Tisdale said tours of the basement collection were so popular she anticipates making them an occasional feature for guests in coming months.

The museum’s collection of contemporary tribal art is often the most popular with visitors, but Klein steered visitors to collections of traditional tribal crafts.

Pottery collections show how some artistic trends were learned from other cultures, such as the way in which pottery skills arrived here from highly organized cultures farther south in Meso-America, Klein said. Other Pueblo pottery shares patterns found in distant lands, such as geometric patterns on tribal pottery that resemble the Jewish Star of David. Klein said scholars believe those symbols were independently conceived by diverse cultures far removed from each other.

Ancient arts have sometimes been revived. Artisans revived ancient symbols when potters from Ohkay Owingeh, formerly San Juan Pueblo, dug up ancient pottery shards in search of designs to offer modern-day markets. In other cases, new concepts have been created to fit a market, such as when ceramic statues were dubbed “rain gods” at the request of merchants who wanted to make the figurines more appealing to tourists, Klein said.

The anthropology lab’s displays have helped the public better understand tribal culture, but Tisdale said misperceptions still abound among museum guests, some of whom bring with them impressions formed by Hollywood drama.

“What I would like to see, as the role of the museum, is dispelling those stereotypes,” Tisdale said.

Students sometimes try to correct docents who guide them through displays depicting the life of Southwestern tribal people today, preferring to view American Indians as uneducated and stuck in the past, Tisdale said.

She is working with state education officials to form a curriculum for schools statewide that will better reflect the reality of tribal cultures past and present, Tisdale said.

Scholars who continue to visit the lab to explore why ancient Pueblo people, often known as Anasazi, left the Four Corners area around 1150 could eventually turn up clues that will help people survive in the Southwest in the future, Tisdale said. Conditions then and now are similar, she said. When Ancient Puebloans disappeared, as today, there was a drought, there was overpopulation and there was political strife, she said.

The museum is planning an exhibit in 2009 that will invite tribal artists to address current environmental concerns such as global warming, Tisdale said.