University Of Pennsylvania Museum Research Articles

Excavating Whiteness in the African Archive: The Story of Amandus Johnson's 1920s Expedition to Angola for the Penn Museum

AbstractAs we further seek to “decolonize” museum images of Africa, the museum archives of African Collections—the correspondence, ledgers, diaries, photographs, and other documents of White explorers working in Africa—suture the colonial practices that produced ways of seeing Africa—and Blackness more broadly—back onto the objects that museums maintain and display today. As increasing scholarly attention seeks to rectify the anti‐Black colonial violence of the archive, this research aims to situate the pedestrian colonial ethnographic practices and spectacular African explorer mythmaking found in museum archives within the foundation of museum anthropology and the museum itself. It also looks to the possibilities of contemporary museum practice to reframe and repair colonial museum constructions of Africa.

Коллекция месопотамских древностей в Йенском университете им. Фридриха Шиллера: история и характеристика собрания

The “Frau Professor Hilprecht Collection”, kept at the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Middle East at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, is the largest collection of Babylonian antiquities in Germany, rivaling in its cultural and historical significance the collections of the Museum of the Ancient Middle East in Berlin, the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia, the Yale Babylonian Collection in New Haven, the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul, the British Museum in London, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and a number of other thematic museum collections. Standing out from their background due to the quality of objects, mainly discovered during the excavations of Nippur and dated from the Sumerian and Old Akkadian period (IV–III thousand BC) up to the early Islamic period, the Jena collection plays an important role in the study of culture, history, science and literature of the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia. The purpose of this article is an analytical review of this collection, highlighting the most significant and interesting artifacts, as well as considering the history of the origin, movement and study of this collection. Special attention is paid to the literary cuneiform tablets, some of which are unique and no longer found in any of the Mesopotamian collections, as well as the one-of-a-kind map of Nippur, dating from the middle of the II millennium BC and considered as the oldest map of the city in the world. The most important topic of the publication and translation of the texts of the tablets and the step-by-step digitization of all the objects of the collection is also touched upon.

An Exploration of Consolidants for Ancient Egyptian Limestone

ABSTRACT The Penn Museum has many monumental architectural elements of the Palace Complex of Merenptah, a 19th Dynasty Egyptian pharaoh. The palace was excavated in Memphis by Clarence Fisher and elements of it, including columns, doorways, and windows, were brought to Philadelphia and installed in the Museum in 1926. The limestone architectural pieces exhibit various condition issues including powdering, flaking, and cracking. In preparation for reinstallation in the Museum’s renovated Egyptian galleries, methods and materials for strengthening and stabilizing the stone were investigated. First, the stone was characterized using thin-section petrographic analysis. After a literature search, the following consolidation materials were selected for initial testing: Conservare, CaLoSil E5, CaLoSil E25, CaLoSil E50, CaLoSil IP5, CaLoSil IP25, diammonium phosphate (DAP), and M-3P bacterial nurturing solution. Test areas were evaluated for reduced powdering, improved strength, and minimal visual change (if any). CaLoSil E5 and M-3P were then further tested to better compare their performance with each other. Paraloid B-72 was also considered for this project and selected for stabilizing areas with structural damages like breaks and cleavage. This article outlines the steps taken and results of testing. It also addresses the treatment choices made for these architectural elements, and the rationale for them.

Chapter 7 Start the Presses? John Alden Mason as Mesoamericanist and a Reluctant New Deal Archaeologist in the 1930s

ABSTRACTDuring the 1930s, J. Alden Mason was a curator at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. He was best known during this time for his work at the site of Piedras Negras in northwestern Guatemala. Yet, the 1930s excavations at Piedras Negras were not published until 2005. This delayed publication prevented other scholars from building on this work. Also, during the 1930s, Mason led lesser‐known excavations around the Philadelphia area with federal work relief funding. No field records exist for these investigations, the whereabouts of artifacts are unknown, and only a single short article was ever published on the scant archaeological findings. Exactly what archaeology was done and where through these New Deal investigations is unknown and may be unknowable. Mason struggled with the overly bureaucratic nature of New Deal archaeology, and this might help explain his lack of due diligence with archiving his records, or with completing a properly detailed report. Today's archaeologists deal with similar constraints. But we are also ethically bound to publish our results in a reasonable time frame, rather than hoard our data the way a dragon hoards a mountain of gold. If we fail to meet these ethical principles, we really are little more than well‐educated looters.

Pyramid Schemes: Resurrecting Tikal through the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex

ABSTRACT Carved out of the jungle by American big business, Penn Museum’s project at Tikal to restore massive pyramids and showcase Maya civilization was a direct outgrowth of government, military, and corporate connections. The story of Pennsylvania in the Petén is about American involvement in developing tourism, infrastructure, research stations, training, and the making of Guatemalan heritage citizens. It is also about increasing US government vigilance south of the border after the 1954 CIA-backed coup, whether in forging anti-communist alliances or commercial concessions. Philanthropists supporting Tikal were themselves representatives from US banking, oil, agriculture, aviation, and tourism sectors, making it impossible to disentangle archaeology from industrial and political adventurism. Extractive economies involving archaeology, oil, chicle, and bananas all ferried equipment and products back and forth to the Petén via American boats and planes, along dirt roads and airstrips built by American firms. Sold as the first great city of the Americas and costing almost a million dollars, the resurrection of Tikal underlines the ineluctable dependencies between security, espionage, international politics, corporations, conservation, and donor economies.

Open access violence: Legacies of white supremacist data making at the Penn Museum, from the Morton Cranial Collection to the MOVE remains

AbstractThis article examines how openly sharing data online can continue the dehumanizing work of 19th century “collectors” who stole the bodies of colonized peoples. It addresses the ongoing controversies at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (“Penn Museum“), regarding the interlinked weaponization of over one thousand crania used by racial scientist Samuel George Morton, and the remains of two Black children murdered by the police in the 1985 MOVE bombing, and asks, how can descendant communities regain their kin and take control of the data the museum has extracted from them? And how can scholars and other heritage workers within colonial institutions support them?

Christopher D. E. Willoughby, Masters of Health. Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools

In 1985, the Philadelphia city government bombed the headquarters of the Black liberation group MOVE, killing six adults and five of their children. In 2021, activist Abdul-Aliy Muhammad denounced that for over 35 years, the remains of two victims were transferred back and forth between the Penn Museum and the University of Princeton. The remains had also been displayed in an online instruction video for a Princeton course series. When Muhammad made the incidents public, Penn & Slavery Project member VanJessica Gladney commented that her community had to witness, ‘once again’ ‘the remains of Black Philadelphians used as a teaching tool’. Just a few months earlier, the University of Pennsylvania had apologised for the ‘unethical possession of human remains’ with reference to the most known skull collections in the history of the racial science, the Morton Cranial Collection. As in the past, the collection had been till then used for research and part of it was showcased in a classroom.

Introduction

Introduction

IN MEMORIAM: Terry T. Marsh (25 July 1938 – 30 July 2021)

Asian Perspectives, Vol. 62, No. 2 © 2023 by the University of Hawai‘i Press. IN MEMORIAM Terry T. Marsh (25 July 1938 – 30 July 2021) Terry Marsh excavating at Spirit Cave, Thailand, in early March 1971 (Photograph by Chet Gorman, courtesy of Joyce White and the Institute for Southeast Asian Archaeology, University of Pennsylvania Museum) On 30 July 2021, Terry T. Marsh passed away at the age of 83 at his home in Auckland, New Zealand. An archaeologist who was as ubiquitous as he was mystic, Marsh had participated in excavations and research at some of the best-known sites in mainland Southeast Asia during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although he published only a few archaeological reports, his interest, kindness, friendship, and dedication made a significant contribution to our knowledge of Thailand and mainland Southeast Asian prehistory. Marsh attended undergraduate school at Sacramento State College (now California State University, Sacramento) in 1958 – 1962. He graduated in spring 1962 with a B.A. in Fine Arts, specifically ceramics. It was during college that Marsh became friends with Chester “Chet” F. Gorman. They were housemates, along with several other students, in a rented home near campus. Although Marsh did not formally graduate with an anthropology degree from Sacramento State College, his journey to archaeology, anthropology, and Thailand began almost immediately after graduation. In spring 1962, Gorman had just finished his first year of graduate school in the Department of Anthropology, University of Hawai‘i when he sent Marsh a telegram that simply Early online release of article in press. stated: “SUMMER WORK CAVE EXPLORATION OUTER ISLANDS COME IMMEDIATELY.”1 Marsh answered the call, and his journey to Southeast Asia began. While in Hawai‘i, Marsh surveyed lava tubes with Gorman as part of a U.S. government project investigating the use of these caves as nuclear fallout shelters. Once their survey was completed, presumably in 1962, Marsh later wrote in an unpublished personal memoir that he “sort of forgot to go home.” He continued working in survey for the same company on various projects throughout the islands. After Gorman returned from his first season of archaeological survey in northeast Thailand in 1964, he and Marsh began living in another rented, shared house infamously known as “Sutton’s Place.” For all its raucousness, living at Sutton’s Place put Marsh in contact with several other anthropologists and archaeologists who were colleagues or friends of Gorman’s at the University of Hawai‘i. One of these housemates-turned-friends was an archaeologist named Donn Bayard. Given Marsh’s background in ceramics and experience working in survey throughout Hawai‘i, it was no surprise that Bayard asked Marsh to assist him when he returned to northeast Thailand in 1968 for the second season of archaeological excavation at a prominent site called Non Nok Tha. Marsh’s travel to northeast Thailand was an adventure. Excavations began at Non Nok Tha in early February 1968, so Marsh likely left Hawai‘i in late 1967 or January 1968. Either way, after booking a berth on a passenger ship from Honolulu to Hong Kong, he immediately became seasick. Medicine helped – after an initial refusal to take it which he blamed on being “a young male” – but Marsh later recalled that the vessel would roll so violently that the swimming pool would slosh and spill over the sides of the ship. Marsh also noted that the vessel had a herd of cattle in the hold which he enjoyed visiting. He also enjoyed later eating them during any one of the six daily meals served on the ship. Marsh’s memoirs and notes are full of food descriptions – he clearly enjoyed eating, trying new experiences, and immersing himself in new cultures. His flair for writing helped capture these moments. After arriving in Hong Kong, Marsh caught another passenger ship which was sailing for Singapore, but once landed, decided that, since he “was on the same landmass as Thailand,” it would be possible to buy a Honda 90 motorbike and ride north. Marsh was able to cross the SingaporeMalaysian border without incident, but once he reached the border with Thailand his fortunes changed. He was not allowed to cross and...

Atomic archaeology: Italian innovation and American adventurism

AbstractThis article charts one episode in the history of archaeological field science following the end of World War II and its place within a nascent military‐industrial‐academic complex. It is an account of how archaeological innovation was tied to, and developed directly out of, US nuclear ambition and the leveraging of “peaceful” atomic research as well as American Cold War collaborations with European allies that successfully combined science, exploration, and culture for mutual benefit. The period covered is one of the most generative moments in the development of instrumentation and subsurface techniques, involving two mid‐century men who realized the potential of atomic applications in archaeology. Carlo Lerici, an Italian engineer and industrialist, and Froelich Rainey, director of the Penn Museum, were both men of science, culture, and industry. Their collaboration brought together governments, corporations, and universities to develop pathbreaking experimentation across laboratories and fieldsites. My aim is to reveal the connectivity between these disparate arenas and to underscore that such endeavors are anything but new; rather, nuclear science, tech companies, private foundations, and philanthropists, coupled with the activities of the military and intelligence community, have a deeply entrenched history in archaeology.

Without their Consent: Handling Legacy Collections and Anatomy Teaching Specimens Acquired without Informed Consent

Legacy collections have proven invaluable for teaching students about anatomy and standard methods. It is safe to presume, however, that ancient and historic decedents never consented to their inclusion in collections or use as pedagogical tools. A utilitarian position—that the use of these human remains serves a higher scientific purpose—becomes even harder to justify when educators acknowledge the historic necropolitical projects and suffering that underpinned the formation of legacy collections. How then to proceed scholastically with such affective and politically charged human remains?As a complex case study, I consider the Samuel G. Morton Crania Collection. To instruct the medical students who populated his anatomy classes, the Philadelphia physician amassed over 900 crania from 1830 to 1851. After Morton’s death, the Academy of Natural Sciences purchased the collection, where it was all but forgotten. Almost a century later, in 1966, it came under the stewardship of the Penn Museum, its pedagogical purpose resurrected. While Stephen Jay Gould drew attention to the scientific racism of Morton’s research, it was not until the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 that ethical deliberations began in earnest. Here I continue these trains of thought with a discussion of the Afro‐Cuban crania in the Morton Collection.Morton acquired these decedents from his Cuban colleague Dr. José Rodriguez Cisneros in 1840. The latter designated them “negros bozales,” an indicator of their enslaved status and African origins; additional information about tribe and country was not provided. In summer 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the racial justice protests his death catalyzed, these skulls erupted into the public consciousness. There were calls to “Return Them All.” I regard this response as well intentioned but also reactionary and unnuanced. To determine if sustained use is viable where consent is inadequate, for this case and more generally, I bring to the fore two concepts: the agentive corpse and ontological insecurity. Both concepts require educators and researchers to culturally contextualize human remains, as well as attend to the dynamic meanings attached to them—by past communities and their living descendants. With this knowledge in hand, I make some tentative recommendations about the fate of these controversial and highly sensitive human remains.

“Your Mysterious Instruments”: American Devices and Imperial Designs in Cold War Archaeology

ABSTRACT This paper tracks a world of instruments and global designs in a new era of archaeology, spearheaded by Froelich Rainey in his role as Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Post-WWII scientific development, industrial-military-academic partnerships, and American adventurism were all brought together through Rainey’s archaeological expeditions. During the 1960s, Penn’s field projects were strategically positioned across the globe, with many trialing a novel technique or different device: Rainey launched a prototype submarine off the Turkish coast, magnetometers and sonic devices across Italy, resistivity in Mexico, and infrared aerial cameras over the Mediterranean. Archaeological innovation was tied to, and developed directly out of, US nuclear ambition and the leveraging of ‘peaceful’ atomic research, and American Cold War collaborations that united science, exploration, and culture for mutual benefit. Here we underscore the connectivities between diverse actors and activities, nuclear science, tech companies, private foundations, and philanthropists, coupled with the military and intelligence community.

A Conversation with Lynn Meskell

Lynn Meskell is PIK Professor of Anthropology in the School of Arts and Sciences, Professor in the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation, and curator in the Middle East and Asia sections at the Penn Museum. She is currently A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University (2019–2025). She holds Honorary Professorships at Oxford University and Liverpool University in the UK and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Over the past twenty years she has been awarded grants and fellowships including those from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Australian Research Council, the American Academy in Rome, the School of American Research, Oxford University and Cambridge University. She is the founding editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology. Meskell has broad theoretical interests including socio-politics, archaeological ethics, global heritage, materiality, as well as feminist and postcolonial theory. Her earlier research examined natural and cultural heritage in South Africa, the archaeology of figurines and burial in Neolithic Turkey and daily life in New Kingdom Egypt.

Doing archaeology outside of the trench: Energizing museum “Diaspora” collections for research

Excavated artifacts and field notes from archaeological excavations are often stored in museums for research and display. Many of these old collections were transferred from their home countries to distant museums from the late 19th to the first half of the 20th century through academic expeditions, inter-museum exchanges, and commercial deals. This paper offers a heuristic tool to generate and examine archaeological research questions that address the sociocultural lives of ancient people utilizing the strength of existing museum collections. Methodologically, it is necessary to select artifacts that are diagnostic on surface appearance and that can be linked, as a “diaspora” collection, to the “original” dataset in their homeland. Diaspora artifacts are those that were unearthed in a homeland site that is far away from the museums where they are currently stored. As such, the site or at least the specific region of their origin needs to be firmly established. Once the diaspora collection is embedded within its homeland dataset, this facilitates development of meaningful research questions and leads to solid archaeological research despite the lack of detailed excavation information. A case study to exemplify this approach is drawn from Jōmon-period pottery data originally excavated near Tokyo and currently stored in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum), Philadelphia. This methodology leads to a conclusion that certain types of special pots in Late Jōmon were used as containers for botanical insect repellent and indoor fragrance.

Targeting Implicit Bias in Medicine: Lessons from Art and Archaeology.

Implicit bias training is not currently a required component of residency education, yet implicit bias in medicine exists and may influence care provided to patients. We propose an innovative exercise that allows trainees to explore implicit bias outside of the clinical environment, in an interdisciplinary manner with museum anthropologists and archaeologists. The curriculum was designed with leaders at the Penn Museum and focuses on differentiating between objective and subjective assessments of historical objects. The first part of the exercise consists of a pre-brief, to introduce trainees to bias through the lens of an anthropologist/archaeologist. The second part guides trainees through “deep description,” where they explore objective and subjective findings of three different objects. The exercise concludes with a debrief and application of concepts learned to everyday clinical practice. This innovation was successful at introducing trainees to implicit bias in a nontraditional environment, and participants reported an improved understanding of implicit bias. Residency programs could consider partnering with local museums to implement a similar exercise as a component of conference curriculum.

Tureng Tepe, a Bronze Age Centre in Northeastern Iran Revisited

ABSTRACT Tureng Tepe is a major site in the archaeology of Iran, but despite having been excavated by two different foreign archaeological missions, crucial periods in its history remain underreported. This is especially the case for the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age layers at the site, which have not been comprehensively published in English. The present investigation focuses on the Frederick and Susanne Wulsin excavation archive and collection at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and shows that despite a rudimentary approach to excavation, the Wulsins' excavation records contain valuable information on the material culture and chronology of the site. Indeed, when viewed in combination with the published information available from the later French excavations directed by Jean Deshayes, the Wulsin excavations help place Tureng Tepe in its local and regional context. This article presents the results of the primary excavations conducted by the Wulsins in 1931, anchoring their Mound C sequence in a relative and absolute chronological framework using parallels to the Deshayes materials, and assesses the utility of the Wulsin collection for future research.

PROBLEMATICAL DEPOSITS AT TIKAL, GUATEMALA: CONTENT, CONTEXT, AND INTENT

AbstractIn the Mesoamerican archaeological literature, collections of material regarded as somehow anomalous according to the archaeologist's expectations are often referred to as problematical deposits (PDs). Their problematical aspect originates in the researcher's current state of knowledge of the particular site, not in past behavior. PDs are site-specific, provisional classifications, and need further study to determine the function or intent of the activity that created them. A sample of 223 features designated as PDs by the University of Pennsylvania Museum's Tikal Project is examined here in an approach to understand their intent. A typology of the sample, based upon content, date, and variables of recovery context, indicates three principal intents broadly summarized as ritual, political, and site maintenance, and a category of PDs without intent. The study of PDs demands a wide-ranging approach. It provides an opportunity to reevaluate inadequate ideas and gain new insights into past cultural behavior.

“The Twenty-Four-Inch Box in Your Living Room is Not a Museum” – Early Experiments in Museum Television

ABSTRACTIn the early 1950s television was the hot new broadcast media. The post-war economic boom meant that more and more American households were purchasing televisions, and television programming was growing to meet demand. The moment was rife with the potential to reach more and more people through the dazzling allure of television. Many American museums saw the potential to expand their audiences beyond their building to reach people who had never stepped foot inside a museum, effectively expanding the reaching of the museum into American living rooms. This idea was not without controversy. In fact, larger debates circulated at the time about whether or not television could be educational as well as entertaining. This essay examines three museum television programs that debuted in 1951–1952 and were amongst the first television program produced by museums. Produced by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Penn Museum, and The Museum of Modern Art, each program reveals individual approaches to the use of emerging technology for educational purposes. This essay considers the value of history in understanding and responding to contemporary debates about technology and change.

Two Punic Stelae Rediscovered in Philadelphia

Two Punic stone stelae and a glass head-bead (of the “demonicmask” type) acquired in North Africa over a century ago have been rediscovered in the Penn Museum. Though present in some European collections, Punic stelae are relatively scarce in US museums. The stelae illustrate the funerary art of late Punic Carthage and votive practices in its so-called tophet, with one of the stelae containing the dedication of an offering by a man counting a rab (“chief ”) and a suffete (“judge”) in his ancestry, indicating that he held a degree of state authority in Carthage. The stelae are representative of the time around the Hannibalic era at Carthage, and are fine illustrations of the historic and sociological conditions in the Punic world.

:The New Chronology of the Bronze Age Settlement of Tepe Hissar, Iran

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe New Chronology of the Bronze Age Settlement of Tepe Hissar, Iran, by Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann. University Museum Monographs 142. Philadelphia: Published for the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology by the University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. xix + 408 pp., 238 figs., and maps. Hardback. $69.95.Mitchell S. RothmanMitchell S. RothmanWidener University and Penn Museum[email protected] Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research Volume 381May 2019 A journal of the American Schools of Oriental Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/702968 Views: 36Total views on this site Journal History This article was published in the Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research (1921-2021), which is continued by the Bulletin of the American Schools of Overseas Research (2022-present). © 2019 American Schools of Oriental Research. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.