Expedition Volume 63 No. 1, Spring 2021

SPRING 2021 | VOL. 63, NO. 1

THE MAGAZINE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

TIKAL: CONNECTING THE MAYA THROUGH TIME KEY MARCO REDISCOVERED • CARTHAGE FRAGMENTS HIDDEN IN OUR STOREROOMS

NEW EXHIBITION

The Art of Archaeological Science

Even the smallest artifacts and specimens are packed with hidden information about the past—we just need the right technology to see it.

ON VIEW THROUGH JUNE 6 Lower Level Special Exhibition Galleries FREE with General Admission FREE to members every day

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Contents

SPRING 2021 | VOLUME 63, NUMBER 1

16 From Lantern Slides to Snapchat: The Key Marco Collection Rediscovered

By Austin Bell and Megan Kassabaum

26 Understanding the Ancient Maya: Contributions of the Penn Museum’s Excavations at Tikal

By Marshall Joseph Becker

38 Tikal—Oasis in Time and War

By Fernando Madrid and Lucy Fowler Williams

DEPARTMENTS 2

From the Publisher

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An Interview with Christopher Woods

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At the Museum

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In the Labs

58 Learning Lessons

46 Fragments of Carthage Rediscovered: Discoveries from Our Museum Storerooms

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Membership Matters

62

Welcome News

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Artifact Perspective

By Jean Macintosh Turfa PENN MUSEUM 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6324 Tel: 215.898.4000 | www.penn.museum The Penn Museum respectfully acknowledges that it is situated on Lenapehoking, the ancestral and spiritual homeland of the Unami Lenape.

ON THE COVER: From the 1960 season, this image of restoration work captures the quintessential Tikal: monumental architecture, intricately carved stelae, and lush jungle backdrop. PM Image 60-4-182.

ABOVE: An image for our times: live-streaming a session from CAAM’s Food and Fire foundation course in Collection Study Room with Teaching Specialist Katherine Moore, November 2020, face-neck jar 27274 in foreground.

Hours Please check our website at www.penn.museum/plan-your-visit for current hours and information.

Guidelines for Visiting The Museum prioritizes a safe and enjoyable experience for all. Learn more about our guidelines for visiting, including booking timed tickets and maintaining social distancing, at www.penn.museum/plan-your-visit.

Admission Penn Museum members: Free; PennCard holders (Penn faculty, staff, and students): Free; Active US military personnel with ID: Free; K-12 teachers with school ID: Free Adults: $18.00; Seniors $16.00; Children (6-17) and students with ID: $13.00; Children 5 and under: Free.

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FROM THE PUBLISHER

Diverse Perspectives

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n the last issue of Expedition I was, with my co-interim directors Melissa Smith and Steve Tinney, on the other side of this page.

I couldn’t be more delighted that our new Williams Director Christopher Woods will take that spot going forward.

Chris’s commitment to bringing new, contemporary voices to speak to the collections and research resonates. As one example, a pop-up exhibition of the stop-motion video The Ballad of Special Ops Cody by Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz—created among the Mesopotamian votive statues in the Oriental Institute—was on view in our Sphinx Gallery for several months following a program with the artist in February 2020.

As Associate Director for Interpretive Programs Kevin Schott notes in Learning Lessons on page 58, amid the changes of 2020, most museums—including ours—intensified their work on decolonization. One important aspect of this work is actively inviting commentaries from more marginalized voices, particularly from communities who made the objects in our care or who inhabit the landscapes they come from today.

Diverse commentary is welcome not only in our galleries but also in our publications, including this magazine. In this issue, we learn about Native American humor from Dakota Sioux Raquel Quinones.

In an interview with Associate Curator and Sabloff Keeper of the American Section Lucy Fowler Williams, Fernando Madrid reflects on his Maya heritage and Tikal. And Gabriel Vanlandingham-Dunn, our School Visit Coordinator as well as a professional writer and music historian, shares his personal connection with the instrument in the Africa Galleries labeled as an mbila (xylophone) but more commonly referred to as a balafon. The vibraphone—a hybrid of the balafon and piano—is closely associated with Jazz or Black American Music.

Expedition magazine has always been a space for different voices, including the voices of our Museum members. We hope you will find joy and inspiration as we continue diversifying perspectives in future issues. We’d love to hear from you as we go along.

PUBLISHER

Amanda Mitchell-Boyask ARCHIVES AND IMAGE EDITOR

Alessandro Pezzati GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Remy Perez

COPY EDITOR

Page Selinsky, Ph.D.

ACADEMIC ADVISORY BOARD

Marie-Claude Boileau, Ph.D. Richard Leventhal, Ph.D. Simon Martin, Ph.D. Janet Monge, Ph.D. Kathleen Morrison, Ph.D. Lauren Ristvet, Ph.D. C. Brian Rose, Ph.D. Page Selinsky, Ph.D. Stephen J. Tinney, Ph.D. Jennifer Houser Wegner, Ph.D. Lucy Fowler Williams, Ph.D. CONTRIBUTORS

Jessica Bicknell Marie-Claude Boileau, Ph.D. Zoë Rayn Evans Kris Forrest Kate Fox Sarah Linn, Ph.D. Ellen Owens Tena Thomason Jo Tiongson-Perez Alessandro Pezzati Julianna Whalen PHOTOGRAPHY

Francine Sarin Jennifer Chiappardi Kristen Hopf Remy Perez Julianna Whalen (unless noted otherwise) INSTITUTIONAL OUTREACH MANAGER

Darragh Nolan

© The Penn Museum, 2021 Expedition (ISSN 0014-4738) is published three times a year by the Penn Museum. Editorial inquiries should be addressed to expedition@pennmuseum.org.

Inquiries regarding delivery of Expedition should be directed to membership@pennmuseum.org.

Unless otherwise noted, all images are courtesy of the Penn Museum. ®

AMANDA MITCHELL-BOYASK PUBLISHER

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AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTOPHER WOODS

Ancient Collections, New Voices Christopher Woods became the Penn Museum’s twelfth Williams Director on April 1, 2021. He shared with Expedition what drew him to the Penn Museum, what it has in common with Chicago’s Oriental Institute (where he was Director from 2017–2021), and how museums with ancient collections can engage with their communities and inspire contemporary voices. left: Christopher Woods. Photo courtesy of the Oriental Institute.

You’ve been in Chicago since 2002, and have overseen a transformation at the Oriental Institute. What draws you now to Philadelphia and Penn?

The Penn Museum has really been at the center of my career—I’ve worked with material from the collection since my graduate school days, and researchers at the Museum and Penn are among my closest colleagues internationally.

For me, as a Sumerologist, the Penn collection has no parallel.

What interests me most, though, is that the collection is global, so for me it gives opportunities to expand my experience, to tell new stories, and I’m particularly excited that at Penn, I’ll be able to support research across the globe. You’re now moving into the second phase of your ambitious Building Transformation project. I have experience from the Oriental Institute in renovating and reinstalling galleries. And I enjoy this work, and I would welcome opportunities that come with fundraising on a larger stage.

What do collections like those at the Oriental Institute and Penn have to offer communities grappling with societal issues today?

Universities and museums can be seen as refuges of privilege, and we have to work hard to combat that notion. At the Oriental Institute, we asked our South Side neighbors what they would like to see in terms of programming, and then partnered with them. As a result, in the wake of the popular Black Panther movie, we programmed a conference on Afrofuturism, which is grounded, in part, in ancient Egypt and Nubia. We had a great conference where we were able to draw connections between a future-looking movement and our Egypt and Nubia collections, and followed up with an Afrofuturism film festival, a book club, and a class on Nubian queens.

Museums including ours are grappling with their origins around collections with colonial roots; how did you deal with that at the Oriental Institute?

I thought it was very important to bring new, contemporary voices to speak to the collections and research and react to them, especially around the major platform of the OI’s centennial in 2019. This reminds me in some ways of what you have done here at Penn through the Global Guides program. Both initiatives speak to the current relevance and importance of ancient collections, which is a critical point to emphasize to our audiences. At Chicago we felt we had an obligation to address tragedies that continue to roil the Middle East, and that it was ethically problematic to ignore what was happening in this part of world. So one of the things we did was to install contemporary artwork by international artists in galleries that housed objects from their countries of origin. For example, we collaborated with the IraqiAmerican artist Michael Rakowitz, whose work speaks to the destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq at the hands of ISIS, and with the Syrian artist Mohamad Hafez, whose work engages with the Syrian civil war and issues of forced migration.

As you settle in at the Penn Museum, how will you reach out to Museum stakeholders?

As we prepare the Museum to serve its communities coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, complete the Building Transformation, and work on a new strategic plan, I look forward to meeting with as many Museum members, neighbors, volunteers, and staff as possible, and I invite our community to attend our events digitally and in person, and to reach out to me.

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AT THE MUSEUM

A New Chapter INTRODUCING TWO NEW PENN MUSEUM LEADERS BEFORE TAKING UP HIS APPOINTMENT as the Penn Museum’s twelfth Williams Director on April 1, Christopher Woods was the John A. Wilson Professor and Director of the Oriental Institute, and member of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Program in the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago. He received his B.S. from Yale University and his Ph.D. in Assyriology from Harvard University, and was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 2002.

While describing himself as “originally a science person” (he majored in Physics at Yale) Dr. Woods was always interested in ancient history, especially of the eastern Mediterranean. As an undergraduate, he took surveys of Egyptian and Mesopotamian history and courses concerned with ancient literatures in translation as electives, and became well-acquainted with those ancient cultures.

Christopher Woods (foreground) with team members from the Oriental Institute in their first trench at Nippur, Iraq. Photo by Jean M. Evans.

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Having started college at just 16, he paused after graduation to take time to “see what else the world has to offer,” so joined the law firm Morgan & Finnegan, LLP, where he analyzed patents. An opportunity to take a firstyear course in Akkadian at Columbia University, which happened to be offered during his lunch hour, rekindled his passion for ancient history and sparked an interest in learning the ancient languages of the region, which allowed access to primary sources.

Learning to read the law code of Hammurabi was so “cool” that it changed the focus of his graduate school applications from physics to ancient Near Eastern languages: admitted to Harvard, he studied Sumerian with Piotr Steinkeller, whom he calls “dean of the third millennium BCE.” He was awed by the great sense of tradition and continuity stretching through thousands of years: “What you study in first millennium BCE Mesopotamia can have roots back in the third millennium BCE,” he explains.

The Sumerian language was fascinating to him because it is the world’s oldest written language and a linguistic isolate—a language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with any other known language, unlike Akkadian, the other major language of Mesopotamia, which is a Semitic language with traceable relationships to other Semitic languages.

Throughout his time as a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, and research and teaching career at the University of Chicago, where he succeeded Dr. Steinkeller’s teacher the legendary Miguel Civil, his research interests crystallized around Sumerian writing and language, but expanded over time to encompass early Mesopotamian religion, literature, mathematics, and administration.

Dr. Woods is author of The Grammar of Perspective: The Sumerian Conjugation Prefixes as a System of Voice (Brill, 2008), the forthcoming Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon (Volume 18), and is currently completing a monograph on early cuneiform writing, The Origins and Development of Writing in Ancient Mesopotamia: A History,

The ziggurat at Nippur, with the Penn Museum’s 1890s dig house visible on the top. Photo by Christopher Woods.

3500—2000 BCE, with another planned on Gilgamesh in the Sumerian literary tradition.

Study of the structural similarities of pristine writing systems—those invented from scratch without any prior exposure to writing—continues to fascinate him: an attraction of the Penn Museum, where he will work side by side with leading experts in decipherment of ancient Chinese, and both Egyptian and Mesoamerican hieroglyphs, as well as the languages of ancient Mesopotamia.

Another attraction is the historic connection to the site of Nippur (in modern-day Iraq), where Penn archaeologists led the first U.S. excavation in the Middle East in the 1880s. Until recently director of the Oriental Institute’s current field research in Nippur, as Williams Director Dr. Woods now occupies the office with Osman Hamdi Bey’s famed painting of that first Penn excavation over the mantelpiece.

Chair (since November 2020) of the Museum’s Board of Advisors Peter Gould trained and initially worked as an economist, including service in the senior staff role at the Council of Economic Advisers in the White House under President Jimmy Carter. He later served Peter Gould during his Ph.D. as Deputy Assistant Secretary field work at Raqch’i, an Inca archaeological site in Peru. of Commerce for Export Photo by Damiana Mamani.

Development, then joined the Burroughs Corporation to lead its strategic planning function. After Burroughs, a career in venture capital investing and investment banking saw him as chair of

the board of two dozen portfolio companies across manufacturing, technology, and service industries, culminating in a decade as President of Superior Group, Inc., an aerospace and industrial products corporation that he led through a turnaround and ultimately the sale of its component businesses.

His non-profit engagements rekindled a passion for history and cultural heritage first developed during his undergraduate years at Swarthmore. Active, with his wife Robin Potter, WG80, in social and cultural nonprofits in the region, he served as Board Chair for the Mann Center for the Performing Arts and, for six years, the Philadelphia Zoo. His long-standing interest in economic development, history, and material culture then led him to a Master’s degree at Penn focused on globalization and heritage, where he soon discovered the Museum.

He joined the Museum’s Board of Advisors in 2008, became Chair of its then-new Director’s Council in 2010, and underwrote with Ms. Potter the exhibition and community engagement program Imagine Africa in 2011. After completing his Penn degree in 2010, he embarked on Ph.D. studies at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, graduating in 2014.

As he wound down his business career, the new Dr. Gould increased his activities in the cultural heritage realm, becoming a consulting scholar for the Penn Cultural Heritage Center and founding chair of its advisory board, and teaching courses at Penn, the American University of Rome, and elsewhere.

He is finance director of the UK archaeological social enterprise, DigVentures Ltd, and has published three books on archaeology, heritage, and economic development in recent years.

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AT THE MUSEUM

Introducing Lynn Meskell NEW PIK PROFESSOR AND MUSEUM CURATOR In November 2020, President Amy Gutmann and Provost Wendell Pritchett were pleased to announce the appointment of Lynn Meskell as Penn’s 26th Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) University Professor.

Dr. Meskell, a world-renowned archaeologist who was most recently Ely Professor of Humanities and Science in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, is the Richard D. Green University Professor, with joint appointments in the Department of Anthropology of the School of Arts and Sciences, the Historic Preservation Program and Department of City and Regional Planning in the Weitzman School of Design, and the Penn Museum as a Curator in both the Asian and Near East Sections.

She has done pioneering archaeological work across the world, including research into Neolithic Turkey and New Kingdom Egypt, published a dozen books, received numerous grants, fellowships, and awards, and is the founding editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology. Dr. Meskell introduces her most Lynn Meskell at Machu Picchu.

current work below.

IT’S A PRIVILEGE to be at Penn in this moment, arriving at a time of social and political transformation.

I first lectured at Penn in 1997, while still a graduate student at Cambridge, and was captivated by the Museum’s Egyptian collections. My Ph.D. research focused on the lives of ordinary people in New Kingdom Egypt and the inequities of age, sex, and class. After working in Egypt for some years and writing several books, I began an ethnographic project in South Africa, supported by the Mellon Foundation, examining the transformation of archaeology after Apartheid. At the same time, I started long-term fieldwork at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. In my experience, it’s always been productive to work on several different projects at one time.

Some of my most recent work adopts a global perspective on the fate of archaeological sites by 6

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examining UNESCO and its World Heritage program.

Since 2011, I’ve been researching the organization both in its Paris archives, through interviews with officials and diplomats, and as an official observer in annual committee meetings where the most important decisions are made. It has taken me to some incredible places including Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, India, Turkey, Lebanon, Peru, Brazil, Senegal, and right across Europe. What I discovered led me to conduct further research and publish with economists, lawyers, and political scientists on issues as diverse as political intrigues and corruption to Indigenous rights and international courts. Much of this work is featured in my 2018 book, A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage and the Dream of Peace.

I wanted to explore how and why the past comes to matter in the present, who shapes the political agendas, and who wins or loses as

Angkor Wat

a consequence. Despite good intentions, international organizations like UNESCO struggle—or have failed— to implement their vision to improve the lot of great swathes of the world. Whether in the fields of climate change, development, or human rights, the greatest impediments to international organizations are most often their member states. World Heritage has become so contentious, since cultural sites are intimately tied to identity, sovereignty, territory, and history-making. For all these reasons I look forward to collaborating with my colleagues here at Penn, especially those in Historic Preservation, Perry World House, Wharton, and the Law School. In fact, the international dimension of research at Penn was a huge draw for me.

Inevitably, my World Heritage work addressed sites in danger, leading to a new project researching destruction and reconstruction in Iraq and Syria. In conjunction with the Arab Barometer and colleagues

Dr. Meskell at Petra

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AT THE MUSEUM

abroad, we’re embarking upon the world’s first survey of Syrian and Iraqi public opinion regarding heritage sites, their destruction, and reconstruction. In addition to the standard demographic data (age, gender, religion, ethnicity, location), we want to know how individuals value and engage with their heritage; how they perceive and interpret specific destructions; and determine the value of reconstructing sites: what are their priorities, how to balance these in relation to humanitarian needs, and if reconstruction contributes to peacebuilding.

The Middle East is also the setting for related work on the role of archaeology and archaeologists in the last 150 years of imperialism, occupation, conflict, and espionage. I’m particularly interested in the militaryindustrial-academic complex for which archaeology has long been a beneficiary, from the discovery of C14 dating to drones. Over the summer, I began studying

Rani Ki Vav

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Penn Museum’s archives from expeditions to Nippur and Ur, following on from work in the British Museum, the Palestine Exploration Fund, and other archives. And there are many more sites and intersections to explore.

Finally, I’m also working in India exploring monumental conservation regimes and how diverse actors and agencies address the needs of living communities. Escalating pressures from development, urbanization, and communal violence threaten both the fabric of conservation and communities. Despite these immense challenges, India’s rich past is increasingly presented by the government as a panacea. Given the sheer scale and complexity of archaeological heritage in India, no nation presents a more fraught and compelling array of challenges to preserving its past. Penn has a long tradition of support for India with two major centers on campus. At the Museum, we have just signed a

memorandum of understanding (MOU) with colleagues at Shiv Nadar University to create a consortium for archaeology and heritage that will support further research and collaboration (see page 62).

I can think of no better place to conduct these projects. Few institutions could match the resources or expertise of the Penn Museum, the School of Arts and Sciences, and the Weitzman School of Design. The integration of knowledge across disciplines at the core of the PIK Program, initiated by Dr. Gutmann in 2005, was an irresistible pull for me to make Penn the base for the interdisciplinary scope of my work.

The Richard D. Green University Professorship is a gift of the late Richard D. Green, a 1952 graduate of The Wharton School.

at right: Dr. Meskell at the Taj Mahal with K.A Kabui, her colleague from the Archaeological Survey of India, Agra.

recent publications

Meskell, L. forthcoming. A Tale of Two Cities: The Fate of Delhi as UNESCO World Heritage. International Journal of Cultural Property.

Meskell, L. 2020. Imperialism, Internationalism, and Archaeology in the Un/Making of the Middle East.

American Anthropologist 122(3): 554–567.

Meskell, L., and B. Isakhan. 2020. UNESCO, World Heritage and the Gridlock over Yemen. Third World Quarterly 41(10): 1776–1791.

Meskell, L. 2021. “Toilets first, temples second: adopting heritage in neoliberal India.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 27.2 (2021): 151–169.

Luke, C., and L. Meskell. 2020. New Deals for the Past: The Cold War, American Archaeology, and UNESCO in Egypt and Syria. History and Anthropology DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2020.1830769.

Meskell, L. 2018. A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage and the Dream of Peace. New York: Oxford University Press.

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AT THE MUSEUM

Leading with Humility: Appreciating an Extraordinary Board Chair

Kowalski Teaching Specialist for Digital Archaeology Jason Herrmann (right) with student Richard Hakes conducting geophysical prospection of a suspected Bronze Age habitation in southern Spain. Photo by Richard Hakes.

IN SEPTEMBER 2020, as readers of Expedition well know, the Penn Museum bid farewell to Williams Director Julian Siggers, who left Philadelphia to become President and CEO of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. A second, and quieter, leadership transition took place two months later, when Michael J. Kowalski, former Chair and CEO of Tiffany & Co., stepped down after an extraordinary 14 years as Chair of the Museum’s Board of Advisors.

As Penn President Amy Gutmann noted, Mike has never been one to seek recognition, yet his inspiring leadership—spanning two University campaigns, three Museum directors, and two historic recessions— is exemplary, and it is impossible to look around the Museum and not see his influence. From funding a series of international research conferences and associated

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Mike Kowalski (right) with (left to right) Provost Wendell Pritchett, Williams Director Julian Siggers, longtime Board member Charles Williams, and President Amy Gutmann with the Sphinx before his journey to the Main Entrance, made possible with Mike’s support. Photo by Eddy Marenco.

publications, through endowing a sweeping collections digitization program and a teaching position in digital archaeology, to leading support of the renovation of its West Wing and Main Entrance, Mike’s philanthropic leadership has catalyzed and made accessible every aspect of the Museum’s programmatic and physical transformation.

Of particular impact in the age of COVID-19, as observed by former Williams Director Richard Hodges, the “digital spine” created with Mike’s support has been a game changer in making hundreds of thousands of object records available online, resulting in a truly global reach. This digital resource also allows Penn professors to continue to use the collections for teaching and

research even through a pandemic forcing closure of the Museum storerooms. Public and K-12 programs have been reimagined as virtual events, putting Penn Museum content on video screens as far away as the Arctic Circle.

Peter Gould, who succeeded Mike as Chair following the Board’s November 2020 meeting, observed that few institutions have faced as much under the tenure of a single leader, and that fewer still have been fortunate enough to have someone of Mike’s wisdom, experience, and insight to help lead them. Indeed, all three of the former Williams Directors who served with him acknowledge the impact of his mentorship, and he steps down as Chair leaving a Museum staff and Board profoundly grateful for his stalwart wisdom and support.

Mike (left) with members of the Board of Advisors on a tour of the Harrison Auditorium while under renovation.

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AT THE MUSEUM

Invisible Beauty: The Art of Archaeological Science

BY MARIE-CLAUDE BOILEAU AND SARAH LINN

A selection of images featured in Invisible Beauty: The Art of Archaeological Science.

WHEN PEOPLE IMAGINE ARCHAEOLOGISTS, they often picture someone working in the field, but new discoveries also constantly happen in the laboratory. The Penn Museum’s new special exhibition Invisible Beauty: The Art of Archaeological Science highlights laboratory research and showcases the role of the university, particularly Penn student research, in archaeological discovery. Large format images of archaeological materials illuminate the astoundingly beautiful world around us, existing at multiple scales and evoking a constant sense of wonder.

What can we learn from looking at a tiny piece of ceramic or scratches on a tooth? A lot, it turns out, as even the smallest specimens and artifacts are packed 12

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with information about the human past. Researchers and students in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials, with colleagues in our Conservation Department and the Penn Paleoecology Lab, have contributed over 25 images that are not only beautiful but represent how archaeological information is gathered and interpreted.

Created with several instrumental methods that reveal what is hidden from the naked eye, the images contain a wealth of information about past human diet, technology, environment, health, and trade.

Certain images show microscopic details such as scratches on a pig’s tooth telling the age and diet of the animal, or fine lines on a Neandertal tooth whose angle and orientation attest to left-handedness. Others

left: From left to right, images by Katherine Moore, James Gross and Tessa de Alarcon: Scratches on a pig tooth, crystals in the pores of a ceramic amphora and image combining photograph and infrared data of falcon figure. right: Image by Katherine Moore and Oscar Aguila: Lab experiments: Bone tissue and obsidian tool.

provide compositional data such as the mineralogical composition of a cooking pot from the Solomon Islands.

And some images highlight post-depositional alterations to the original material or object, such as minerals that crystallized in the bone tissue of a guanaco, crystals that fill pores in the fabric of an amphora that was submerged in sea water for centuries, or the painted decoration on a wooden sculpture now only visible in the infrared range.

Laboratory-based research also involves experimentation, including small-scale tests such as burning cattle bones at increasingly high temperatures to estimate the kind of burning ancient bones might have experienced, or using an obsidian tool made in a class activity to cut wood or bone and observing the edge damage to understand signs of how similar tools might have been used in the past.

To play with the “hidden” theme of the exhibition and illustrate the different scales of analysis we work with, we included aerial orthomosaic images and unique 3D models of magnetic gradiometry data which map sub-surface features of the ancient city of Zincirli, Turkey, or tombs at Amarna, Egypt, without excavation. At the opposite end of the scale continuum, a clay specimen from Ban Chiang, Thailand, imaged at more than 26,000 times using a scanning electron microscope, reveals our smallest specimen: a single-cell organism called a diatom.

Several of the images are displayed alongside their associated object or specimen, and offer insight into ongoing Penn Museum research.

Marie-Claude Boileau, Ph.D., is Director and Teaching Specialist for Ceramics in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials; Sarah Linn, Ph.D., is Research Liaison in the Academic Engagement

Image by Marie-Claude Boileau and Joyce White: Diatom in a clay sample from Ban Chiang, Thailand.

Co-curators Sarah Linn and Marie-Claude Boileau discuss objects in the exhibition.

INVISIBLE BEAUTY: THE ART OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SCIENCE IS ON VIEW IN THE MERLE-SMITH SPECIAL EXHIBITION GALLERIES ON THE LOWER LEVEL THROUGH JUNE 6, 2021.

Department. They co-curated the exhibition Invisible Beauty.

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AT THE MUSEUM

Teaching a Course on Monuments and Museums in the Time of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter

BY RICHARD M. LEVENTHAL

IN MID-MARCH OF LAST YEAR (2020), as Penn moved all classes to online instruction, I was called back to Philadelphia from field work in Mexico where we were working collaboratively with a Maya community on a heritage and preservation program. I had flown there at the end of February with little fear of the emerging coronavirus. The world, as we perceived it then, was changing dramatically.

But this was just the beginning of the change. In May, the murder of George Floyd and the following protests highlighted the racial and social injustices that had plagued American society and culture for the nation’s entire existence. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the need for massive structural change within American communities were re-enforced throughout the remainder of 2020, with additional police shootings of unarmed Black people and with ongoing and constant nationwide protests.

In addition, all of this was set within a critical political backdrop of the 2020 national elections which framed a stark contrast for the future of the country.

My undergraduate class scheduled for the fall of 2020 was to be a class I had taught before, ANTH141, titled Public Policy, Museums, and Cultural Heritage.

However, as I prepared to teach this class, it became increasingly clear that I could not simply translate the past versions to an online environment. With one of the focal points of the Black Lives Matter movement on the nature of public representation and monuments, it became clear to me that the class, even in its new virtual setting, had to focus on the changes and societal developments within our own communities. Protests, politics, and public health became an integral part of the new course, now titled: Monuments, Museums, and 14

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Heritage in the Times of COVID and Black Lives Matter.

But the question was: how could I present, in this online teaching environment, the immediacy and intersection of the protests and the politics combined with COVID-19? Students in the class were scattered across the globe (China, South Korea, Kansas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and other locations) with some living with strict lock-down rules.

Summer training at Penn’s Center for Teaching and Learning provided me with some initial tools for teaching within the online environment. But as I look back now, the course’s possible success was due to the willingness and desire of the students to be engaged with their communities outside of their homes. And in October, the Philadelphia shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. brought to the virtual classroom a somber reminder of the continued injustices in this city as well as other disparities within the United States.

Powerful newspaper and online articles about public monuments, BLM, the U.S. political scene, and on COVID-19 helped initiate and frame our daily conversations. We started the class with one of the most powerful public statements, an opinion piece in the New York Times by Caroline Randall Williams, “You Want a Confederate Monument? My body is a Confederate Monument,” (New York Times, June 26, 2020). In a perfect intersection, students were able to see and hear (online) a wonderful talk by Caroline Randall Williams hosted by the Penn Museum for the 2020–2021 Great Lecture Series, “Great Monuments”.

All of the class sessions were synchronous—meaning we all met online at the same time on Tuesdays and Thursdays. To keep the immediacy and importance of the ongoing protests and activities throughout the U.S., we

Each class session in Richard Leventhal’s Fall 2020 course Monuments, Museums, and Heritage in the Times of COVID and Black Lives Matter began with a 15–20 minute presentation on current news and developments.

started each class with a 15-20 minute presentation by students or me on current news and developments—the debate on Civil War statues at universities, the refusal to remove statues of Civil War generals, the renaming of public buildings and schools, the financial impact upon museums and other cultural institutions from COVID-19 closures, along with many other developments. That students were participating from across the globe made for deeply meaningful discussions, as they talked about events right outside their doors. Powerful moments included a presentation on Tiananmen Square as a monument both for the Chinese government and to the democracy movement, as well as the ongoing discussion at Washington and Lee University as it grappled with its history and its future.

As might be expected, there were also many discussions that created a theoretical and structural framing of the practical nature of monuments and around change across the social and physical landscape of the U.S. The discussion was also focused upon museums and the presentation of stories about the past and the present. The Penn Museum, even though we were not in the building, continued to be the focus of much conversation on the nature of power and colonialism in the past and in the present. And surprisingly, the online environment did not stifle active daily discussion about current events outside our windows, framed within the context of anthropological theory and Black Lives Matter, all covered with an umbrella of COVID-19 and 2020 politics.

Taking a class like this was, I believe, critically important for the students to connect their university

experience to important developments in the real world. But the online environment created a sense for all of us that we were looking out of a window into that world and those events. Fortunately, part of the work for the class included two actual visits by each student to a monument local to where they were locked down, one at the beginning of the class and one near the end. I think that these visits were important, for they created a three-dimensional context for monuments and their meanings during a class taught through a twodimensional computer screen. The depth of meanings of these monuments became real during these visits.

The conflicted interpretations of Christopher Columbus were not just theoretical, or framed by a PowerPoint presentation, but could be felt physically and mentally by students as they visited these monuments that create not only a physical landscape but also a story of who we are, where we have come from, and how we want to represent ourselves for the future.

Richard M. Leventhal is the Executive Director of the Penn Cultural Heritage Center and Curator in the American Section at the Penn Museum, and Professor in Penn’s Department of Anthropology.

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From Lantern Slides to Snapchat: THE KEY MARCO COLLECTION REDISCOVERED

BY AUSTIN J. BELL AND MEGAN C. KASSABAUM

The Penn Museum holds an exceptional collection of objects from Key Marco, Florida—rarely preserved masks, figureheads, bowls, and various other tools. Collected during its 1896 excavations led by Frank Cushing, these objects provide clues to understanding both the ceremonies and daily life of the Native people of Marco Island.

A collaboration between the Penn Museum and the Marco Island Historical Society (MIHS) has brought many of these objects back home to the Island, where they are currently displayed less than three miles from where Cushing and his team recovered them. The collaboration has also been an opportunity for MIHS Curator Austin Bell and

above: Due to its exceptional levels of preservation, Key Marco is one of very few sites where shell tools have been found intact and hafted to wood handles as originally intended. Photo Lot 2 (09675100), National Anth. Archives, Smithsonian Institution. opposite: Shell tools in the Penn Museum’s collection. The holes visible on these artifacts are related to how they were hafted to their wood handles.

From top: 70-19-74, 70-19-75, 40337.

Penn Museum Weingarten Assistant Curator for North America Megan Kassabaum to delve into further research on the objects and reflect on their remarkable history of preservation and display through time.

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THE KEY MARCO COLLECTION REDISCOVERED

WHAT’S OLD IS NEW AGAIN On March 4, 1896, knee-deep in a foul-smelling swamp in South Florida, anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, battling heat exhaustion, voracious insects, and chronic illness, could not have been happier. The year prior at Key Marco, a small village on the north end of what is now Marco Island, local proprietor William D. Collier had uncovered some unusual objects in a “muck pit” on his property. This “muck pit” sat amidst an impressive series of shell mounds and other shell works constructed by the earlier Native American inhabitants of the island. Within months, Cushing was there to investigate in person, arriving by way of steamship, railroad, horseback, and schooner. His brief but promising reconnaissance in 1895 brought him back to Key Marco for the work he was now undertaking—a more thorough archaeological excavation of the site. Despite the many obstacles facing him and his crew, with weeks more work before them, Cushing still had cause to proclaim in his journal that this day was the “greatest…of my life in exploration.”

The 1896 expedition to Florida was sponsored by Dr. William Pepper, founder of the Penn Museum and University of Pennsylvania Provost, and philanthropist Phoebe Hearst, who went on to launch the University of California Museum of Anthropology (now called the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology). Widely heralded as one of the most important endeavors in the

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above: Originally from the town of North East, Pennsylvania, Frank Hamilton Cushing (1857–1900) was an anthropologist with the Bureau of American Ethnology known for his pioneering work at Zuni Pueblo.

SAAM-1985.66.3126_1, Smithsonian American Art Museum. below: The Key Marco site during the 1896 excavations. This photograph was taken by Wells M. Sawyer, who accompanied the expedition in order to document the archaeological process and the incredible artifacts it uncovered. PM image 140493.

The Calusa People of South Florida When Cushing began excavating the remarkable

and used seagoing vessels, cargo canoes, and barges

objects from Key Marco, he referred to the people

to facilitate the movement of people and goods. The

who made them as “Key Dwellers” because they

Calusa remained in their pre-contact territory for

inhabited the small islands off the coast of Florida.

generations after European contact. In the late 1690s,

Today, we recognize them as the ancestors of the

their population was estimated at 2,000, but by 1750

Calusa, a powerful Native society that occupied

many Calusa people had become victims of warfare,

southwest Florida when it was colonized by Spaniards

slavery, and diseases introduced by European

in the early sixteenth century. The Calusa were fisher-

colonization. Calusa society fades from the historical

gatherer-hunters who achieved exceptional levels

record in the 18th century. Because there are no

of political complexity without depending on staple

recorded Calusa ethnographies or oral histories, what

agricultural crops. Smaller inland villages paid tribute

we know relies heavily on ethnohistorical sources

to powerful leaders living in larger coastal towns and

such as firsthand accounts of Spanish explorers and

these communities were connected by an elaborate

missionaries and on archaeological collections such

system of artificially constructed canals. They built

as those held by the Penn Museum.

history of North American archaeology, the PepperHearst Expedition yielded a remarkable assemblage of artifacts. The vast array of recovered materials offers still unrivaled insight into the Native American people that lived on the southwest coast of Florida for centuries prior to its invasion from Europe. Most frequently attributed to the late precontact Calusa (1300–1513 CE) or earlier Glades (500 BCE–1300 CE) cultures, the more than 1,000 artifacts found at the site included a majority made of wood and plant fiber—materials that do not ordinarily survive in archaeological sites. An anaerobic (oxygen-free) layer of wet, peaty marl preserved the artifacts in “like new” condition for centuries, until Cushing and his crew drained the area and began their excavation. above: “People of the Estuary.” Art by Merald Clark. Image courtesy of the Florida Museum of Natural History. right: Map showing the location of the Key Marco site on Marco Island on the western coast of Florida.

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THE KEY MARCO COLLECTION REDISCOVERED

A UNIQUE VIEW INTO FLORIDA’S PAST

In a letter written to Dr. Pepper on March 1, 1896, Cushing exclaimed, “the discoveries I am now daily making are unparalleled in the annals of American archaeology!” Florida Explorations 1894–1903, Penn Museum Archives.

Cushing knew immediately that he was on to something big at Key Marco. In a letter written to Dr. Pepper on March 1, 1896, Cushing exclaimed, “the discoveries I am now daily making are unparalleled in the annals of American archaeology!” While motivated in part by an urgent need for funding to continue the excavation, Cushing’s hyperbolic language has proven increasingly prophetic with the passage of time. The priceless artifacts, which he successfully secured additional funding to obtain, are still being exhibited, studied, and talked about nearly 125 years after they were recovered.

Due to the site’s unique preservation conditions, an astonishing variety of artifact types were recovered from Key Marco. Carved wooden masks and animal figureheads, some with paint pigments still clearly visible, were among a prized assortment of wholly unique ceremonial objects—some of which are now individually famous. More common were utilitarian objects made of wood, bone, shell, and plant fiber, such as netting, float pegs, shell and shark-tooth tool handles, wooden bowls, mortar and pestle kits, fishing tackle, and more. These objects offer a rare glimpse into the daily life of a coastal Florida maritime society based upon fishing, a fact which differentiates the Key Marco people from many other late precontact groups who relied heavily on agriculture.

While Key Marco’s everyday artifacts sometimes take a backseat to their more artistic counterparts, they are equally, if not more, important to understanding life in the past. For example, based on their presence at the

These wooden tools demonstrate Key Marco’s remarkable levels of preservation and give archaeologists an unusual window into the daily life of people living at the site. left: Atlatl (40609A), float pegs (40549), and hafted tool (40418A and B). right: Wood vessel (40184) with mortar and pestle (40201A and B).

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The highly decorated statuary, masks, and figureheads from Key Marco represent some of the better-known objects from the site They offer a glimpse into the rich ritual and ceremonial lives of its inhabitants. left: The Key Marco cat. NMNH-2018-03434, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution. right: Sea turtle figurehead with downturned beak (40715) and wooden alligator figurehead (40718A and B).

same site, we now know that the Key Marco Cat was likely carved in-part with shark-tooth tools. Key Marco is the only site at which such tools have been found intact and hafted to wood handles as originally intended.

Thus, with his excavations at the site, Cushing revealed a previously unknown medium of precontact Native American artistry and technology.

The material evidence of this woodworking industry far outnumbered the ceramics and shell tools common at other sites in the area. The presence of such materials provides a broader understanding of Florida’s native peoples and serves as an important reminder of what is likely missing from archaeological sites across the eastern United States where organic artifacts have not been preserved. If every site had the same preservation conditions as Key Marco, we might have an entirely different, and certainly more holistic, understanding of early lifeways. While Cushing’s findings sparked more than a century of archaeological exploration and discovery in Florida, and similar rates of excavation have

been undertaken throughout the southeastern United States, comparable material evidence remains scant.

THE KEY MARCO COLLECTION IN ITS HISTORICAL CONTEXT In 1896, the United States was little more than three decades removed from the Civil War, Grover Cleveland was president, and anthropology was still in its infancy.

Institutions like the Smithsonian and the Penn Museum were focused on accumulating material culture from what they thought were “vanishing” cultures in North America. Importantly, South Florida had largely been left out of the process of western expansion, leaving its many large shell mound sites relatively undisturbed.

Key Marco’s discovery fortunately occurred before destruction and development in Florida dramatically altered the landscape and destroyed countless archaeological sites.

That said, anthropologists at the time ran their expeditions without the level of regard to context,

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THE KEY MARCO COLLECTION REDISCOVERED

Then and Now: An Archaeologist’s Toolkit While many of the tools archaeologists use for excavation have remained remarkably consistent through time, the technologies available for documenting and communicating what they find during their excavations have changed dramatically, as they likely will again.

1896

2021

Black and white photography

Digital photography

Glass plate negative

Memory card

Watercolor painting

Adobe Photoshop

Topographical map

LIDAR scan

Mold/casting

3D Scanner/printer

Written letters via mail boat

Cell phones, email, text messaging

Funding via postal mail

Direct deposit, credit cards

Shipping crate filled with sand

Shipping crate filled with inert foam

Improvisation and guess work

Evolved standards and best practices

above: Trowel used in the field by Weingarten Assistant Curator of the American Section Dr. Megan Kassabaum.

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provenience, or Indigenous rights that we recognize as important today. Moreover, the requisite knowledge and technology by which to safely collect and preserve waterlogged materials would not exist for another century. Cushing’s crew fought valiantly to preserve the fragile, waterlogged materials, but were ill-equipped.

Cushing, in his 1896 presentation to the American Philosophical Society, lamented that “it was distressing to feel that even by merely exposing and inspecting them, we were dooming so many of them to destruction.”

Despite this, he left Florida with “more than a thousand… examples…of perishable materials” from the site in what he described as “measurably good condition.”

Many wooden artifacts disintegrated at the site immediately upon exposure to the air and light, and most others have gradually shrunken, warped, and generally deteriorated in museum storage over the past 12 decades.

Yet, even in their deteriorated and diminished states, these artifacts still hold vast potential for archaeological researchers and are regularly re-examined by Penn Museum curators, consulting scholars, and students.

As the Key Marco artifacts silently passed into the 20th and then 21st centuries, they bore witness to evolving practices and theories in anthropology, the establishment of now-basic preservation standards in museums, and the emergence of new science and technologies.

Basic advancements, such as color photography, have helped document the objects for posterity. Today, artifacts are being scanned in three dimensions and full color and advanced scientific technologies such as radiocarbon dating, isotopic analysis, X-ray fluorescence scanning, and gas chromatography are routinely utilized by archaeologists. These technologies, along with other heretofore unforeseen advancements in the field, will undoubtedly tell us more about Key Marco’s past residents, so long as the objects they left behind are continually available for study.

SHARING KEY MARCO WITH THE PUBLIC No new data gleaned from these advancements would be worth gathering if the resulting information was not shared. Further scientific study ushers in new interpretations, new publications, new exhibitions, and new modes of communicating to the public. The

An Education in Preservation When waterlogged objects are removed from their anaerobic environment, a number of changes to their composition immediately begin to take place. Water within the object evaporates, leading to the warping and twisting effects evident on many Key Marco objects. Pigments used to color the surface of the artifact fade, causing detailed decoration to be permanently lost. In 1896, color photography did not exist, but Cushing employed Wells Sawyer to produce on-site, 1:1-scale watercolors of the most elaborate and colorful objects. These paintings allow us to view the now-warped wooden objects alongside a representation of their original form and decoration. For the last five years, these archaeological and archival objects have been used in introductorylevel archaeology courses taught through Penn’s Department of Anthropology. Students are able to compare the appearance of the object with its associated painting, allowing them to better visualize and understand the complex topic of archaeological preservation.

More recently, an anthropology Ph.D. student in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials’ Archaeobotany seminar wrote a proposal to use measurements derived from Sawyer’s paintings and the

Wooden mask, (LEFT) seen shrunken and warped in recent photography and (ABOVE) at time of excavation in Wells Sawyer’s 1896 1:1 watercolor. 40716; PM image 174609.

shrunken and warped Key Marco masks to help archaeologists better understand the original dimensions of materials for which no such illustrations exist.

Key Marco artifacts have been displayed in a variety of exhibitions since being collected, from now-outdated “cabinets of curiosity” on the National Mall in Washington D.C., to the Smithsonian’s epic Circa 1492 quincentenary exhibition of 1992, to more recent Native American art exhibitions in various American cities. In the 1950s, some Key Marco objects were featured on the Penn Museum’s What in the World TV program. Between 2014 and today, the collection has featured prominently in both the Native American Voices gallery and the Moundbuilders: Ancient Architects of North America exhibition.

In 2018, some of the Key Marco artifacts traveled “home” for exhibition at the Marco Island Historical Museum, a local history museum founded in 2010 and located less than three miles from where the objects were originally recovered. Allowing objects to travel from the large museums in which they have been curated to more local institutions is an increasingly common practice, particularly when extant Indigenous communities are involved. As museums continue to work to address the colonial histories and narratives in which

they are enmeshed and provide more opportunities for objects to be interpreted by both the communities that originally made them and those who inhabit those ancient landscapes today, we can expect displays and interpretations to continue to change with them.

The advent of the internet and the proliferation of social media means that the Key Marco objects are probably more well known now than at any time since their discovery. Yet, the power of the authentic artifacts to generate and hold public interest in Florida’s ancient history and heritage is something that no technology could ever replicate. That power is as real today as it was in 1896. As a member of the Victorian-era societal elite and Curator for the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology, Cushing might gawk at the Key Marco Cat Snapchat filter made for the return of Key Marco artifacts to Marco Island in January 2019; however, that filter—and the history it presented—reached nearly 4,000 people in a new, engaging, and accessible way.

Despite vast theoretical and technological differences, what Cushing had in common with today’s

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THE KEY MARCO COLLECTION REDISCOVERED

Snapchat filter of the Key Marco cat, developed for the grand reopening of the MIHS permanent exhibition. Cat art by Merald Clark. Filter

by Austin Bell.

curators was an enthusiasm for the objects and a desire to share what he knew about them with the public.

This is demonstrated by his track record of scholarly publications and interviews, but even more importantly, it is made clear in the various first-person accounts of his interactions with the public, who seemed to always come away from conversations with Cushing having garnered a better understanding of the site and of Florida’s deep past. Unfortunately, Key Marco would be Cushing’s last major project; he died prematurely in 1900 at age 42 after a career beset by controversy, illness, and his own ambition. Yet, the collections he recovered, now divided between the Penn Museum, the Florida Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of Natural History, and the National Museum of the American Indian, are still being studied, written about, exhibited, and discussed in new and interesting ways, some of which might even have blown Cushing’s notoriously creative mind.

Austin J. Bell is Curator of Collections for the Marco Island Historical Society and the author of several books on Marco Island. Megan C. Kassabaum is Weingarten Assistant Curator of the American Section, Penn Museum, and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

for further reading:

Bell, A.J. 2021. The Nine Lives of Florida’s Famous Key Marco Cat. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Kolianos, P.E. and B.R. Weisman, eds. 2005. The Florida Journals of Frank Hamilton Cushing. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Cushing, F.H. 1986. Preliminary Report on the Exploration of Ancient Key-dweller Remains on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Vol. 35. No. 153. Philadelphia: MacCalla & Co.

MacMahon, D. and W.H. Marquardt. 2004. The Calusa and Their Legacy: South Florida People and Their Environments.

Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Gilliland, M. 1975. The Material Culture of Key Marco, Florida.

Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Milanich, J.T. 1994. Archaeology of Precolumbian Florida.

Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Gilliland, M. 1989. Key Marco’s Buried Treasure: Archaeology and Adventure in the Nineteenth Century. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Griffin, J.W. 2002. Archaeology of the Everglades. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

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Purdy, B. 1991. The Art and Archaeology of Florida’s Wetlands.

Cleveland: CRC Press.

Fowler Williams, L, 1991. The Calusa Indians: Maritime Peoples of Florida in the Age of Columbus. Expedition 33(2): 55–61.

The Marco Island Historical Museum On January 26, 2019, the Marco Island Historical Museum celebrated a grand re-opening of its permanent exhibition, Paradise Found: 6,000 Years of People on Marco Island. Central to the revamped exhibition are loans of prominent artifacts found by Cushing in 1896, including the Key Marco Cat from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, a rotation of 20 iconic artifacts from the Penn Museum, and three bone artifacts from the Florida Museum of Natural History.

The Marco Island Historical Museum, which opened in 2010, made major improvements to its facilities in order to accommodate the fragile

top: The Calusa exhibit at the Marco Island Historical Museum.

Photo by Seamus Payne. above: Curator Austin Bell in the exhibition.

Photo by Vandy Major.

objects and their many admirers. An additional 300

its all-time annual visitation record of 20,684.

artifacts from Key Marco and other Marco Island

The return of the artifacts, announced proudly on

sites, excavated by professional archaeologists over

light-pole banners around Marco Island, has been a

the last 25 years and now curated by the Marco

transformative event for the small museum and the

Island Historical Society, are displayed alongside

community it serves.

the loaned artifacts. The loans have brought

The artifacts will be on display through April 2026.

extraordinary visibility and a dramatic increase in

The Marco Island Historical Museum is located at 180

visitation to the Museum. On April 6, 2019—just over

S. Heathwood Dr., Marco Island, FL 34145 and is open

three months into the year—the museum surpassed

Tuesday thru Saturday, 9 am to 4 pm. Admission is free.

@THEMIHS @COLLIERMUSEUMS

@THEMIHS @COLLIERMUSEUMS

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Altar (for a stela) showing a bound figure lying prone. PM image 63-4-1421.

Understanding Ancient Maya THE

Contributions of the Penn Museum’s Excavations at Tikal

BY MARSHALL JOSEPH BECKER

Over the years, Expedition has provided readers with many updates from the Museum’s research at Tikal in Guatemala. Now, more than 50 years after excavations at this site were turned over to the Guatemalan government’s Proyecto Nacional Tikal (PNT), Marshall Becker, who was on the Penn team working at Tikal in the 1950s, looks back on the extraordinary achievements of the Tikal Project and the influence of that research, published in 33 volumes to date, on Maya archaeology.

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UNDERSTANDING THE ANCIENT MAYA

MAPPING THE URBAN CHARACTER OF TIKAL Excavations conducted by the Penn Museum (previously known as the University Museum) in Central America have had a long and fruitful history. From the early discoveries of Drs. J. Alden Mason and Linton Satterthwaite at ancient cities such as Piedras Negras in the 1930s to those post–World War II (WWII) studies of Drs. Alfred Kidder, Edwin Shook, and William Coe at Tikal, teams of scholars from Philadelphia revealed details of the basic story of the ancient Maya. One of the first and most important contributions from the Tikal Project researchers was a map created by Robert Carr and James Hazard demonstrating the urban character of this ancient city that had been so long hidden beneath a thick forest canopy. Among the other discoveries at Tikal was the recognition of architectural patterns among the different groupings of structures, and the identification of specific functions of these “plaza plans.” Many of the plaza plans recognized at Tikal now can be identified at other sites, allowing us to make comparisons and explore ancient Maya culture change through time and space.

Edwin Shook, director of the Tikal Project, excavates a trench on the North Acropolis. PM image 59-3-7.

Detail from the map of the ruins of Tikal, El Peten, Guatemala, published in Tikal Report no. 11 by Robert F. Carr and James E. Hazard (Philadelphia: University Museum, 1961).

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left: Surveying and photographing among the monuments in the central plaza, overlooking the base of Temple I. PM Image 59-17-163. right: The airstrip, with team members unloading supplies from a small DC3 plane. PM image 56-3-3.

The earliest phases of Maya research explored specific cities that had been covered by dense tropical rainforests for centuries. Later explorers focused on clearing and photographing the largest temples at major Maya sites, but the Penn teams had a more modern strategy. They planned extensive mapping and systematic testing of a diverse range of structures, some of which had been recognized by the earliest explorers.

Before WWII, most of these sites were accessible only by mule trains, essential for bringing scholars, laborers, and all their provisions to the targeted location. After WWII, a dirt airstrip was cleared at Tikal, next to the bajo (intermittent swamp) at the eastern margin of the ancient city. The airfield was designed to facilitate the transport of chicle blocks (raw chewing gum harvested from wild trees in the forest) to Guatemala City for sale to chewing gum companies. This strip also provided a means by which an extensive project could be supplied entirely by air.

Dr. Edwin Shook began work in the Maya region in 1934, joining the Carnegie Institution of Washington team at Uaxactun (1926–1937), some 20 km to the north of Tikal. Shook convinced Penn Museum Director Froelich (Fro) Rainey that a major, multiyear project at Tikal could be established and sustained completely by air. In 1955, with the permission of the Guatemalan

Beth Ralph and Ted Kidder, of the Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology (MASCA) performing C14 analysis, ca.1954. PM image 63180.

government, Rainey appointed Shook to direct a field project that would have a number of very different scholarly components. Each was to be led by one or more of Penn’s noted archaeologists and supported by graduate students, most of them selected from the Anthropology Department at Penn.

The formation of the Tikal Project at the Penn Museum took place as Americanist archaeology was increasingly refined through scientific studies. The Museum was already advanced in the application of scientific techniques, such as C14 analysis for archaeological dating—completed by the Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology (MASCA)— and was continually influenced by new findings from

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Excavations of the North Acropolis and Temple I. PM image 59-17-27.

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UNDERSTANDING THE ANCIENT MAYA

left: Members of the 1959 excavation team. PM image 59-4-291. right: An “E-Group” in the southwestern part of the mapped area of the site. Image courtesy of Maria Josefa Iglesias Ponce de Leon.

anthropological research. Archaeologists had long recognized that sites throughout the Maya lowlands were much more complex than simply clusters of large ceremonial buildings. What seemed to be the “ceremonial center” of most sites is now recognized as the “core” or administrative heart of a sprawling city. A city such as Tikal includes a vast hinterland within which the residential groups including houses of the inhabitants spread for more than 10 km beyond the site’s core. Walking between Tikal and Uaxactun takes a traveler past a decreasing density of houses in the Tikal periphery until about the midpoint, where house numbers begin to increase as one passes into the suburbs of neighboring Uaxactun, a smaller city. Where the dividing point between these two ancient cities is located remains a question to be answered.

at Uaxactun. Their presence at cities throughout the Maya lowlands reveals how local populations may have developed an understanding of the visible universe far more sophisticated than anything that existed at a time centuries before Europe’s famous astronomers Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) were even born.

The major temples at Tikal are so tall that their tops are visible above the forest. Planes flying into Tikal actually pass below the peaks of these enormous constructions. As

SPECIFIC-USE STRUCTURES In 1924, Danish archaeologist Frans Blom first recognized a specific group of ancient Maya buildings that he believed served as an astronomical observatory. This cluster of buildings, a plan identified at Uaxactun as the “E-Group,” was tested during excavations in the 1930s and determined to have been used as observatories for naked-eye astronomy.

Since that discovery, groups similar in layout and function have been identified at a great number of Maya sites including Tikal. These groups are all identified as generic “E-groups” after the group notation that was used

Linton Satterthwaite examining the text on a stela. PM image 58-4-1211.

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The North Acropolis trench, revealing 1,000 years of Maya history. PM image 63-4-1088.

the 1956 season was getting under way, Satterthwaite reported that “a fine new carved stela and altar had just been discovered.” Shook, with his vast knowledge of lowland Maya archaeological sites, postulated that a “special pattern of assemblage” was represented by this stela-altar pair and the buildings with which it was associated, and that this new example of this pattern was the fifth one to be recognized at Tikal. All conform to a basic plan: a pair of tall, four-sided platforms facing each other on the east and west of a large plaza, with a long ritual building to the south and an enclosure on the north, built around a carved monument with a date marking the end of a katun, a 20-year period in the Maya calendar. Later Dr. Christopher Jones, archaeologist at the Penn Museum, recognized three more examples at Tikal.

Inscriptions on these monuments indicate that these groups were erected at 20-year intervals. Shook’s “twinpyramid” groups are now identified as Tikal Plaza Plan 1 (PP1: Becker and Jones, Tikal Report 18, forthcoming), a feature characteristic of Tikal. These twin pyramid groups provide an example of a type of architectural regularity 32

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that existed for at least 150 years. The recognition of this regular pattern in an architectural group allows us to predict form as well as function for specific sets of buildings that were scattered throughout Tikal.

SALVAGE ARCHAEOLOGY AT TIKAL The continued search for carved monuments covered with ancient texts led to the discovery of a wide variety of smaller structures throughout the ancient city. In 1959, it became urgently important to excavate one group of small buildings as it was in the path of planned construction. During that summer, Dr. Ann Chowning directed excavations at this cluster of small structures, excavations that included a number of firsts in Maya archaeology. Chowning appears to be the first woman to direct a multiperson field team in the Maya lowlands.

These were also the first archaeological excavations covering an extended group of ordinary Maya residential buildings. A third new discovery was that this work was initiated as “salvage” archaeology: the recovery of data from an area of the site that was scheduled for

UNDERSTANDING THE ANCIENT MAYA

left: The project’s sawmill. PM image 59-4-1131a. right: Mechanic Don Max Sifuentes and his miracle forge. PM image 59-17-413.

destruction. The targeted area was the location intended for the project’s sawmill and the planned village for workers who were brought in to maintain the project. An important question addressed by this excavation was how successfully a field team could work after the summer rains had begun. Excavations in the lowlands had been confined to the dry season, roughly between January and May of each year. Excavators also learned where the Maya buried their dead. The locations of royal burials had not yet been predicted, but, in 1959, Chowning found that almost every structure she excavated held the remains of the very people who lived in these households. Burials, as well as ritual caches of all sorts, abounded in and around these small platforms that served as the foundations for the pole and thatch buildings that made up most Maya structures. This construction style, still in use, was used to build the housing for the project as well as for the sawmill.

MAPPING TIKAL The recognition of how individual buildings or groups of structures of similar form were used allowed archaeologists to understand the composition of ancient

Maya cities. One of Shook’s important innovations at Tikal was his decision to map, in detail, 9 km2 of the central portion of this sprawling Maya metropolis, later increased to 16. Shook assembled a team of mappers who devoted two years to drafting a map of every structure in this area. The initial results were then rechecked and refined. These results, a first in Maya archaeology, have been in print as Tikal Report 11 for nearly 60 years, long before LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging—an aerial surveying method using pulsed light) became more widely available in archaeology.

The map of Tikal, using traditional labor-intensive methods, has been duplicated at only a handful of Maya sites during the past five decades. This method continues to provide an accurate basis for planning excavations at Tikal. The extensive and detailed map of Tikal revealed that there are more than 2,000 separate structures within the mapped zone, clustered into 690 distinct groups. The vast majority of these groups housed a single extended Maya family, averaging 25 individuals. Thus, the mapped central portion of ancient Tikal had a population of roughly 17,000. If all the people

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Stela within an enclosure forming part of one of the many Plaza Plan 1 groups at Tikal. PM image 60-4-182.

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resident in Tikal’s vast hinterlands are included, the total population was about 45,000. These were the first calculations of the population for an ancient Maya city based on direct evidence.

USING THE MAP TO CONDUCT FURTHER RESEARCH The huge temples and 1,000 years of archaeological accumulation represented by Tikal’s North Acropolis merited Coe’s 30 years of archaeological endeavor. The Tikal map enabled us to formulate a wide variety of research projects at different locations at the site. One of these early projects focused on a peninsula of land jutting into the bajo south of the Tikal airfield. This naturally defined area had nine clusters of buildings (houses) of various sizes; each group included a shrine on the eastern side. The excavation and publication of these groups and the verification of the accuracy of the map in this zone became my doctoral dissertation.

The primary findings of these excavations included confirmation of the residential functions of these groups.

An entire group formed a single ancient Maya residence: a house compound for an extended family. We also discovered evidence for specialized occupations for specific families, such as the production of fine painted ceramics, woodworking, and even dentistry. Perhaps the most important discovery made during this year of research was that the structure on the eastern margin of these groups was a ritual building or family shrine.

Each shrine included the burials of important members of the family living within this group of structures.

The project camp: palm thatched buildings grouped around an ancient waterhole. PM image 59-16-77.

When the map of Tikal is examined in detail, we can find other examples of these small shrines on the eastern side of an architectural group, structures that are diagnostic of PP2 (see below). They had been detected by the mapping team but remained to be ground tested. Each of these shrines is relatively small in plan, square in shape, and low compared with other structures in the group. Each includes a series of burials, the first of which is placed in a grave dug down into the limestone bedrock. The presence of a shrine on the east of a residential group, in which the other structures are relatively regular rectangular residential structures, aligned N-S and E-W, provided the marker for a specific and new type of plaza plan at Tikal. With the Twin-pyramid groups representing Tikal Plaza Plan 1 (PP1), groups with a mortuary shrine on the east can be identified as Tikal Plaza Plan 2 (PP2). Regular residential

Ceramic whistles molded in the shapes of various local animals—evidence of specialist occupations in the examined groups. PM image X59-24-A9.

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groups at Tikal that are similar but have no shrine on the east are identified as conforming to Tikal Plaza Plan 3 (PP3). Many other plaza plans have been recognized in recent years.

Although all the groups on the targeted peninsula at Tikal have shrines on the east, similar shrines are relatively infrequent at other parts of the site. A review of the map reveals that only about 15 percent of all the residential groups at Tikal conform to PP2. A majority conform to PP3, a cluster of residential structures with no evident ritual building. As a test of the idea that we can distinguish shrines on the east using only the map, we used the map to select a random sample of each type and then spent a summer field season excavating only the eastern structure of each. Not only were we 100 percent able to predict the group plan from the map alone, but we even found one group that began as PP2 and was

converted to PP3, and another that was the reverse.

Whatever cultural or religious tradition was associated with the shrines on the east of PP2 groups, some families at Tikal switched at some point in their history, showing evidence of cultural change. Excavations at other sites have demonstrated that the PP2 was more common. In at least one site in the Maya lowlands, residential groups conforming to PP2 form more than 90 percent of all the houses identified. Variations in percentages from site to site must be telling us something.

Of particular interest at Tikal is that the size of household groups belonging to the same Plaza Plan varies widely. This suggests that families using similar religious practices demonstrate wide variations in their wealth.

While the functions of the various buildings forming the group were identical to all the others of that PP, the resources involved varied enormously. This reveals wide variations in economic status within the social groups that used the same housing pattern. When applied throughout the site, these finds suggest that the people called “kings” may have been very rich, and first came to lead by virtue of their wealth—an example of a “heterarchical” system.

Social equality with wide economic variation helps us to understand why there are no clear concentric zones of occupation at Tikal. Wealthy and poor families both lived close to the site’s residential center and all economic classes also lived in outlying areas. The full version of the map of Tikal created by Carr and Hazard (see detail, page 28) shows that small houses of the poorer residents are found randomly distributed over the landscape, along with house compounds of the elite and various ritual structures.

LOCATING TOMBS

Aubrey Trik and Fro Rainey in the tunnel beneath Temple I, seeking what became known as Burial 116—a major example of a PP 2 shrine.

Photo by Fritz Goro, PM image 180647.

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Because we now know that the Tikal Maya conceived each architectural group as following a specific pattern, we can use our understanding of these cultural rules regarding each Plaza Plan to direct our excavations more efficiently, particularly when applied to locating major tombs. Unfortunately, within a year of recognizing the relationship between PP2 and burial locations, looters throughout the region of Petén used this information to locate important tombs.

The PP2 pattern at Tikal was used by archaeologists to locate Burial 116, a major tomb found beneath Temple I. Having discovered the cultural rules regarding the

Stone tools for used for cutting and carving.

PM image X59-24-A16.

placement of burials within PP2 shrines, we knew to search off the axis of the huge Temple I construction and look for the previous structure into which the tomb had been dug. In effect, the area of the Great Plaza at Tikal began life with a design that was not a PP2 but was converted to one under the direction of the family of the king who was interred there.

Over the years, other Plaza Plans have been recognized at Tikal. For example, PP4 is characterized by a small square platform in the center of its plaza.

These variations in the residential plaza plans reveal the degree of ethnic diversity as well as the processes of culture change that were present at Tikal. Each of these different arrangements of structures, identified with distinct PP numbers, allows us to evaluate the composition of this ancient site, all based on careful mapping. The same process, based on maps alone, has already been applied with enormous success to other sites such as Quiriguá and Copán. The landmark map of Tikal, drawn up the old-fashioned way, will also serve as a basis to test the possible uses of LIDAR in conducting future archaeological research.

Marshall Joseph Becker, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus (Anthropology) at West Chester University. He worked at Tikal as a Penn graduate student and wrote his M.A. thesis and dissertation on aspects of the site, published as Tikal Reports 19 and 21. for further reading:

Becker, M.J. 1979. “Priests, Peasants and Ceremonial Centers: The Intellectual History of a Model.”

In Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited

by Norman Hammond and Gordon R. Willey, pp.

3–20. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Sabloff, J., editor. 2003. Tikal: Dynasties, Foreigners, and Affairs of State. Advancing Maya Archaeology.

Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Tikal Reports. 1957–present. Current Series Editors: William A. Haviland and Simon Martin.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

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Tikal—Oasis in Time and War

BY FERNANDO MADRID AND LUCY FOWLER WILLIAMS

Fernando Madrid was born 20 miles from Tikal in El Remat Village at the start of Guatemala’s Civil War. In 1973, when he was just nine years old, his father was killed by the Guatemalan Army. The Director of the Tikal National Park quickly and quietly moved 16 Maya families inside the Park Tour guide Fernando Madrid grew up at Tikal and is a passionate teacher of Maya philosophy there today. Tourism is Guatemala’s third largest industry, after agriculture and textiles. Photo by Lucy Fowler Williams.

boundary to be safe from the killing. With his eight brothers and sisters, Fernando lived his entire childhood inside the Park.

They created a small primary school and

lived among the protected ruins through the armed conflict of his generation. Today, as a professional tour guide, he introduces visitors to Maya ideas and the back alleys and secrets of the Park. Of mixed heritage, he speaks Spanish, English, Italian, and Kekchi, the Maya language of his family.

With deep admiration for the Penn Museum’s archaeological investigations at Tikal, he shared his passion over Zoom in 2020. What follows is adapted from our conversation.

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I

n 1989, the tourism industry in Guatemala started up again. At Tikal, a small group of us boys and girls started to do this job extemporaneously. The life inside there was completely different with respect to the other villages around Tikal; it was an oasis. We were living through the internal conflict, all the problems of the social crisis of Guatemala, but Tikal was different, it was like a paradise. We were 16 families living inside the Park. All the boys and girls were friends and we played together.

We studied at the Tikal school and in the afternoons and on weekends we sold soft drinks behind the main plaza to raise money to support our families—Coca Cola, Fanta, Pepsi, and, of course, beer. We took the drinks from the small shops and restaurants and profited 15 or 20 cents for each one.

When I was 15, I started to work in the Jungle Lodge Hotel—the camp for the University of Pennsylvania archaeologists. Mr. Ortiz, the owner, gave us the opportunity to start working there as housekeepers and to learn about tourism. He gave me the opportunity to study at the trade school Instituto Técnico de Capacitacion (INTECAP) when I was 15. At 17, I started work as a tour guide at the hotel, a year before I got my diploma.

I have known a lot of the archaeologists because they always came to meet Mr. Ortiz at the Jungle Lodge.

Temple 1. Photos by Lucy Fowler Williams.

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I remember Christopher Jones and Michal D. Coe who wrote important books on the Maya. Chris Jones was very, very good because he clearly explained the relationships between the Maya cities. He never spun fantastic stories, but instead stayed very close to the archaeological evidence. If you read Chris Jones, you can see more of the real story of the relationship of the cities such as Dos Pilas (to the southwest) and Calakmul (to the north).

I continue to take information from his work for this reason. He was a very kind and generous man and open to the people. He always talked with us to answer our questions and explain the different theories.

My colleagues and I believe Penn archaeologists did a great job because they were preservationists. They tried to leave the architecture in its original aspect. They never rebuilt it, they just restored it. That is the way to respect the ancient Mayas, and the visitors as well. Visitors often say of Mexico at Chichén-Itzá, for example, that they rebuilt that, but here at Tikal we can see the original monuments.

For me, the most impressive monument at Tikal, where I feel most connected, is Temple 1. I feel it is talking to me, like a man standing up and telling me his personal history. The second most impressive thing is the nature around Tikal. It is like a little basket full of treasures on a green carpet.

Teaching at Tikal’s Grand Plaza in front of Jaguar Temple 1, which memorializes Jasaw Chan K’awiil I, who died in 734 CE, Madrid uses the work of Penn Museum archaeologists to explain Maya architecture, philosophy, and religion.

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View of Tikal from Temple 5 with pyramid-temples 1 and 2 in the distance. Photo by Lucy Fowler Williams.

Most people who come here are unfamiliar with Maya culture. You need to create context in a dynamic way to explain. My favorite topic that brings all the structures together is Maya philosophy. It helps explain what they were thinking. This is the key to understanding the Maya sites, especially at Tikal, the largest of them all.

How they canonized their knowledge for the common people really interests me. If you do this, it is easier for visitors to understand the place. Linda Schele’s work was amazing. Linda took the risk to start talking about Maya beliefs and philosophy at a higher level. The other archaeologists are more conservative. She took the great risk to try to understand and to try to explain the deepest ideas and elements of Maya culture. Her book, of course, that is so important is The Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path (1995).

For me, the key to Maya religion was time. The calendar structures the religion and is used to control the masses. I like explaining the cyclical movement of time. If you know the past you can explain the future.

Knowing time is cyclical, you can create the perfect religion with prophecies and lots of predictions because you know things will happen at a precise moment.

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The common people didn’t know this, and they thought oh, he speaks with god. The calendar was the key to the Maya government. They used nature to explain life.

DEEP KNOWLEDGE OF NATURE THROUGH CLOSE OBSERVATION I talk with visitors about the cosmovision as the first step because this offers the magical explanation of nature. When you observe, you realize nature has rules.

When you understand nature is cyclical, and if you calculate the cycles of time, you can know how nature works and you can pass to the other level, the cosmology.

When you have cosmology, you just need one more step, the religion. If you take the deep knowledge of nature, cover it with cosmovision or myths, the myths are like anchors that tie the two into time and space. The myths then are the keys of the religion.

People may think it is difficult to understand. If you are Catholic, you go in front of a church and see Saint John. You see others and continue learning the meaning of the church with its parallel or lateral altars, and you keep going deeper in the faith. When you arrive at the main altar to have contact with god, you are full of ideas

and myths and you can have this communication with the god you believe in.

It is basically the same thing at Tikal. The Grand Plaza is like the facade of a church in the Maya religion.

Commoners knew that when they went from the periphery to the ceremonial center, they were having communication with god through the priests.

SACRED SPACES MAKE CONTACT WITH NATURE According to interpretations of different experts, the Maya religion was based in nature. The builders were assured they were building sacred temples of the bodies of the different natural forces. For example, Complex Q, the twin pyramid complex, personified the twin heroes, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, Sun and Moon. The nine doors building there (a form typical of twin pyramid complexes) to the south of the plaza represented the nine doors to the underworld where Xquic, mother of the hero twins, came from Xibalba. And the fourth pyramid to the north was just a place to worship the k’atun period of twenty years. The buildings were sacred places to have contact with those natural forces.

Archaeologists used to say the Maya were polytheistic. But if you talk with modern Maya priests, they are sure they believe in only one god—Hunab Ku. The others are personifications of natural forces such as rain, sun, and wind. Hunab Ku has no personification— Mayas sometimes represented Hunab Ku with a ring with no beginning or end, the cyclical universe. All the other things come from the universe and are part of the universe. But the people need to see something to believe. For example, the big mask with the low nose and lightening shape, this is rain or Chaac. Nature is our mother. All the parts of nature are our brothers. You have to respect everything—trees, animals, plants, because it is all part of this one unique thing, Hunab Ku, we call god.

The Ceiba tree (Yax che, big tree or life tree) is very special because it is the tallest tree in Guatemala. For that reason, the Maya took it to be the connection between the underworld, the natural world, and overworld. Since 1952, it has been the national tree of Guatemala. In Tikal, we also have mahogany, cedars, and the ramón tree. Maya mixed ramón fruit with corn to make tea and tamales.

We have medicinal and aromatic plants, and 64 different species of orchids. We have primary forest and still have

A member of the Peten Birders Club, Madrid helped identify 300 species in Tikal National Park in 2017 including his favorite, the Trogon. Photo by Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

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the natural food chain conflict. I have seen jaguars several times, eagles, hawks, king vultures, toucans, trogons, white tail deer, tapir, pumas, and ocelots. We have hundreds of beautiful birds, 300 species in Tikal.

EVERY MAYA PERSON DREAMS OF GOING TO TIKAL TO VISIT THE SOULS OF THEIR ANCESTORS Since 2002, the Guatemalan Government recognizes Maya people as authentic descendants and established their political and cultural rights. They are allowed to visit archaeological sites, which are living ceremonial centers, without fear. They just need to notify the Park director and can hold their ceremonies. I always like to speak with Maya people at Tikal. In the Highlands, Maya shaman are really connected with the past. They honor Tikal, the largest ceremonial center where the souls of their ancestors are located. Every Maya person dreams of going to Tikal once in their lifetime to visit their ancestors. But it is very far for them to travel, so they use the closer archaeological site of Iximche, though it was mostly destroyed by the Spanish in the 16th century.

The shamans were able to conserve the moon calendar because this is connected with agriculture. Through the

living religion they know the moon calendar very well.

The sun calendar was forgotten because the conquerors destroyed the Maya books and the intellectual people.

However, the basic knowledge is still present in Guatemala today. Now archaeologists are giving the knowledge to the people, and they are integrating that knowledge into their daily lives.

A VIBRANT, LIVING CULTURE Our government just gave our people legal recognition, but international entities like NGOs, universities, and European governments support the Maya cultural process that is pulling up the Maya people. In the last ten years they are starting to feel proud to be Mayas and are recovering their histories. Much of this history is coming from the archaeologists. My job is to make the people fall in love with the Maya culture. We have one unique thing in the world and that is a living, alive culture. You can see the great past, but you can also go inside among the Maya. You can’t do this in other places. Here you can still see and experience and be among the Maya who are practicing their beliefs, still wearing their garments, speaking their languages, and talking about nature in the same way the ancient Mayas did.

Part of a living ceremonial center, Temple 2 on the Grand Plaza memorializes Lady Lahan Unen Mo’ who died ca. 704 CE. Every Maya person dreams of going to Tikal once in their lifetime to visit their ancestors. Photo by Lucy Fowler Williams.

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Fernando Madrid is a professional tour guide at Tikal National Park, in Guatemala. Lucy Fowler Williams, Ph.D., is Associate Curator and Sabloff Senior Keeper of Collections in the American Section of the Penn Museum. A cultural anthropologist, her research interests include issues surrounding Indigenous identity.

for further reading:

Jones, C. 1996. Tikal Report 16: Excavations in the East Plaza of Tikal, Volumes I and II. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Jones, C. and L. Satterthwaite, illustrations by W. Coe. 1982. Tikal Report 33A: The Monuments and Inscriptions of Tikal—The Carved Monuments. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Schele, L., D. Friedel, and J. Parker. 1995. The Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path. New York: William Morrow and Company.

Photo by Lucy Fowler Williams.

Penn Alumni and friends were lucky to experience Fernando Madrid’s tour of Tikal and Lucy Fowler Williams’ illuminating talks on a Penn Alumni Travel trip to Guatemala in 2018. Penn Alumni Travel invites alumni and friends to explore the world in the company of a Penn faculty host and with the camaraderie of like-minded, intellectually curious travelers. When you’re ready to dream about travel again, or to be added to the mailing list, please visit www.alumni.upenn.edu/travel.

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Fragments of Carthage

Rediscovered

DISCOVERIES FROM OUR MUSEUM STOREROOMS

BY JEAN MACINTOSH TURFA

THE OBJECTS in the Penn Museum store rooms—many collected more than 100 years ago—hold many rewarding surprises. Recently, Asian Section Keeper Stephen Lang found—in the Asian Section storage—two fragmentary stone stelae that once were erected in Carthage in the century before Rome conquered and destroyed the city in 146 BCE. One stood in the tophet, the infant sacrifice cemetery, and the other served as a tombstone in one of the great city’s many necropoleis, perhaps the neighborhood known in modern times as “Sainte Monique.”

Both small slabs came to the Museum as part of the bequest of Maxwell Sommerville (1829–1904), a sizable portion of which he collected in Asia. He had also donated his famous collection of engraved gems and seals, which includes five engraved Phoenician scarab-seals. opposite: Punic funerary stele, front view. 29-130-154. this page: Inscribed Punic stele, front view. 29-130-155.

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The 1815 painting by Joseph Mallord William Turner, Dido Building Carthage, or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire, on display in London at the National Gallery. © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY.

T

he first stele fragment bears an important inscription in the Phoenician language, as written by Carthaginians in their later days.

When the object was cataloged in 1934, the curator at the time, Helen E. Fernald, knowing the characters were not Chinese, relegated it to storage with a note stating the fragment had an “incised inscription in an Indian script.” There the piece remained until Steve recognized

the characters for something quite different and special.

It seems the Museum holds a small illustration of the history of the city of Hannibal just before it disappeared under the Roman army.

Sommerville had traveled extensively in Asia but also through Turkey, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa. He left a partial memoir of a visit to Tunisia and Carthage in his book Sands of the Sahara (1901). He does not describe the purchase of the stelae, but they are carved in the distinctive gray-white limestone of Carthage and squeezes (latex impressions) of the incised inscription were stored in the Bardo Museum in Tunis. There, they were photographically recorded and published in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum (CIS 2952) in or just after 1881. Many stelae and other antiquities excavated in Carthage in the 19th century, under various conditions, found their way to the art market.

Located near the city Tunis in modern day Tunisia, the 2100-year-old ruins of Carthage still remain. The Carthaginian Empire collapsed when it was conquered by the Romans in 146 BCE. Photo by Emilie LaRosa.

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MARKER FOR A SPECIAL OFFERING The inscribed stele must have been found in the city neighborhood known today as “Salammbô” (after the title of Gustave Flaubert’s 1862 historical fantasy novel).

When complete, the slab had an architectural format, cut at the top into the outline of a peaked roof, like a shrine or tomb with acroteria (ornaments) on the corners. It is now broken across both the gabled top and the bottom line of the formulaic inscription (its present height is 23.5 cm). Below the ornamentation was a seven-line inscription, commemorating an offering made by a man from a very distinguished family. The offering would have been a child.

LRBT LTNT PN Bʿ L WLʾDN LBʿL Ḥ MN ʾŠ NDR ḤN[ʿB] N GRʿŠTRT [HR?] B BN ḤMLKT H[ŠP] Ṭ BN ʾŠMN… The translation reads:

To the lady to Tinnit “Face of Ba’l” and to the lord to Ba’l Ḥamon, (this is what) vowed Ḥanno [son of] Ger’ashtart [the rab(?) son of Ḥimilkot the [sufes son of Eshmun]…

Transcription and translation by J.M. Turfa, with generous help from Professor Mariagiulia Amadasi, Università di Roma La Sapienza.

This is a standard formula for votive offerings, and probably ended with the phrase “because he [the god] heard his voice,” a standard acknowledgment that a prayer had been answered. The listing of Hanno’s family’s honors over four generations, however, sets this dedication apart from most other Carthage pedigrees: his father Gerashtart was a rab, a high-ranking magistrate of the city of Carthage, and his paternal grandfather Himilkot had been a shofet/suffete, or judge, one of two elected each year. Romans equated the power of the suffetes with that of kings. What was dedicated to Baal Hammon and the goddess Tinnit (Tanit), the “Face of

Sébastien Slodtz’s 1704 marble of Hannibal Barca. He is depicted after the Battle of Cannae in 216 BCE, counting the signet rings of the dead Romans. This sculpture resides in the Gardens of the Tuileries at the Louvre Museum. Photo by Carole Raddato, Frankfurt, Germany.

Baal,” was an infant, who would have been cremated and buried beneath this stele in Tinnit’s garden-like precinct. In recent years, the cremated bones buried in little jars in tophets in North Africa, Sardinia, and Sicily have been variously interpreted, with the majority of scholars now convinced that most (but not necessarily all) of the infants offered had died of natural causes or even been stillborn and not deliberately harmed. Rather, they might be understood as being “offered” or dedicated to the god Baal and his consort Tinnit. Tophets have been found in other Phoenician colonies (and one was denounced in Jerusalem) but are not known in the

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Identifying an Ancient Script

By Stephen Lang, Lyons Keeper of Collections, Asian Section ONE OF THE ONGOING PROJECTS in the Asian Section is an attempt to identify, transcribe, and translate any text found on an object in the collection. This is a challenge given the diversity of languages and scripts in Asia as well as the large number of objects in the Section, close to 30,000. It was in this context that the stele fragment featured here caught my eye—I was pulling an object from storage for a class and needed to move a piece out of the way to get to the back of the drawer.

When I picked it up, I noticed that it had writing on it that was completely foreign to me. Curious, I decided to investigate and noted that it had come in from the collection of Maxwell Sommerville. In the Asian Section, most of the Sommerville material came from either Japan or India. I knew the text wasn’t Japanese so I figured it must be Indian in origin, however, after consulting some reference books and colleagues, it didn’t seem to match any script from the region. It was a bit of a mystery.

The mottling of the stone made it hard to read the characters, so I scanned in the inscription with a NextEngine scanner to get a better sense of all the characters present. With the scan in hand, I opened up the search to all languages and scripts, starting with ones that would have some kind of early alphabet. After a little digging I settled on a likely identification of Punic or Phoenician. After finding some similar examples on the British Museum’s website, I sent my findings to the Mediterranean section to see if it looked familiar to them. The object eventually found its way to Jean Turfa’s desk, and she was able to confirm my early suspicions and took the lead on tracking down the origins of the piece. It now resides safely in the Mediterranean Section, where it can be used by scholars and students alike.

An illustration of a stela with Punic inscription in the British Museum’s Collection helped Keeper Steve Lang identify the Penn Museum stela. From Davis, N. 1861. Carthage and her remains: being an account of the excavations and researches on the site of the Phoenician metropolis in Africa, and other adjacent places.

Conducted under the auspices of Her Majesty’s government. New York: Harper & Brothers. Pl. VII no. 19.

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The inscribed Punic stele 29-130-155 being scanned, and the scanned image.

FRAGMENTS OF CARTHAGE REDISCOVERED

Stelae in a Carthaginian tophet.

Photo by user BishkekRocks, Wikimedia Commons.

Phoenician homeland or Spain, where Phoenician cities and, later, Carthage established a colonial empire. It is interesting to note that the original stone stele, while not cheap to commission, was no different in size and simple craftsmanship from hundreds of others placed in the Carthaginian sanctuary—even though Hanno (and his baby) came from a distinguished family. Following Hannibal’s defeat at Zama in 202 BCE, many aristocratic Punic families moved back to Carthage from Spain and elsewhere, as the city struggled to pay war reparations to Rome, and it may be that family finances were strained.

THE TOPHET RITUAL The tophets of the Phoenician colonies such as Motya in Sicily, Tharros and Sulcis in Sardinia, or Carthage in North Africa, were burial grounds for cremated infants and sacrificed animals, set apart from adult necropoleis and linked to the cults of Baal and Tinnit. Inscriptions, as on stelae, refer to the mlk or molk sacrifice, sometimes indicating molk adam (“offering of a human”) or a molk immor, the substitution sacrifice of a lamb. Other urns

contain baby animals ritually killed and cremated along with the “offered” (but probably already dead) child.

Ancient Greek and Roman accounts of the practice are highly prejudiced, but it appears from a few inscriptions that in special cases live children were sacrificed. The practice continued in North Africa after the Roman conquest of 146 BCE, for instance among the family of Massinissa, the famous king of Numidia (the North African kingdom bordering Carthage to the west) who joined with Rome against his old allies. The controversial debate continues.

A GRAVE STELE The other stele, uninscribed and from a different part of Carthage, was carved with a plain gable and the image of a draped female figure set in a niche, perhaps a worshiper holding an incense box, with her right arm raised in pious greeting. It is broken across its base, making its present height 32 cm, and its surface retains a waxy coating probably applied in the 19th century.

This was a typical Punic memorial for an adult buried

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A Phoenico-Punic glass head-bead, dating to the late 7th–5th centuries and believed to have been made in Algeria, front view and side view.

29-236-99.2.

in a regular necropolis and is, again, in fine-grained Carthaginian limestone. Its format is also seen in nearby Sicily and Sardinia. It would have marked a burial, presumably of a woman, in a reserved family plot. Many such monuments were excavated and sold in the 19th century, the early days of exploration of Carthage.

ADDITIONAL PUNIC OBJECTS The last Punic item from the rediscovered Sommerville bequest must have been acquired about the same time as the stelae: packaged with a post-antique bead necklace was a small, brightly colored, glass pendant depicting a slightly comical “demon” head. Core-formed opaque glass was modeled in the shape of a bearded head or mask with bulging eyes and protruding nose, in deep red-brown, decorated with black, white, and yellow drips of opaque glass. The type was made in archaic (7th–5th centuries BCE) Phoenician factories and was popular in Carthage; it may have been discovered in an early Carthaginian tomb, but no documentation accompanied this small item when it reached the Museum.

Such ornaments with faces may have served as protective amulets and are sometimes found as offerings with the infant burials.

The Phoenicians and their Carthaginian heirs were famous for purveying such pretty, desirable, and sometimes magical objects to other parts of the

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Mediterranean and beyond. One related Punic glass bead in the Mediterranean Section, probably 4th century BCE in date, was likely made in Carthage: a blue and yellow cylindrical bead with its center pulled up into three bearded male faces. It has a very interesting provenance: the Maikop Treasure, a collection of rich ornaments and equipment from the Black Sea region and its rich Scythian burial mounds. The Mediterranean Section also preserves a small number of distinctive Punic doublewick lamps and later, Roman lamps from the re-founded city of Carthage, but the head-bead and stelae, even bereft of their original burials, are unique historical items from Maxwell Sommerville’s collection.

A cylindrical glass-mosaic bead, only 2.4 cm in diameter. It is decorated in blue, yellow, and white opaque glass in the form of a face.

30-33-42.

A reconstruction of the ancient city from the Carthage National Museum. License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en.

The Carthaginian Empire THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN was peppered with colonial, commercial settlements called by their Phoenician founders “Carthage”—Kart-hadasht, or “Newtown”—but the preeminent colony that soon overshadowed the mother-city Tyre was surely the great city on Cap Bon, on the promontory of modern Tunisia. Phoenician colonial

CARTHAGE

sites and cultures, especially that of Carthage, are termed Punic. Virgil’s epic Aeneid places the foundation, by the queen Dido (Elissa), at the time of the Trojan War (Late Bronze Age), but archaeological activity thus far has identified a 9th-century BCE settlement that rapidly grew to become a maritime empire.

Carthage produced and traded both luxury goods and necessities

Carthage and its dependencies in 264 BCE. Wikipedia; license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en.

from the Atlantic to the eastern Mediterranean, including gold, silver, ivory, and glass alongside oil, grain, wine, and fish preserves. Punic statesmen negotiated agreements with Etruria, Sicily, Sardinia, and Iberia as well as neighboring North Africa. One treaty partner that turned on her was Rome, and the subsequent “Punic Wars” (264–146 BCE) that made the Barca (Hamilcar, Hasdrubal, Hannibal) and Scipio (Africanus, Aemilianus) families famous ended in 146 BCE with the destruction of the city by Rome. Much later, Carthage was re-established by Augustus (29 BCE); its position for the grain trade was too important to abandon, and a flourishing city rose on the ruins. The original settlement and the tophet sanctuary were close to the beach with the acropolis (called the Byrsa) behind them; a series of necropoleis surrounded the residential neighborhoods. Since victors tend to write the histories of conflicts, much of our knowledge of Punic Carthage depends upon archaeological evidence. right: Terra cotta statuette of Baal-Hammon seated on his throne, flanked by sphinxes. 1st century CE, in the collection of the Bardo National Museum. Photo by Alexander Van Loon; license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en.

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Exploring Carthage Today EVER SINCE ROMAN TIMES Carthage has been a beautiful resort town, where visitors can drift between Punic, Roman, and medieval archaeological sites sprinkled between gardens and the Mediterranean Sea. A little electric train plies between Tunis and the hilltop village of Sidi Bou Said on the coast just west of Carthage (Sidi Bou is where the King Saint Louis sat grieving the loss of Jerusalem in the Crusades). The Punic Admiralty and warship docks and fine houses built in the days of Hannibal, Roman villas with colorful mosaics, amphitheaters and early churches all await your visit to Carthage. Museums in Carthage (on the Byrsa, its acropolis) and Tunis (the famous Bardo Museum) offer displays of artifacts of all periods found in the city and its many tombs. Tunis was a native town in the days of Dido and Hannibal (see Flaubert’s novel about Hannibal’s sister, Salammbo) and has boulevards decorated with green strips planted with scented jasmine that fill with chirping sparrows as night draws on.

Carthage, as enjoyed by the Penn Alumni Travel group in fall 2019. Photo

by Emilie LaRosa.

Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Carthage is a short train ride from Tunis, which is very accessible by sea with several regular ferry routes from European ports including Marseilles (France), and Genoa, Civitavecchia, Salerno, and Palermo (Italy). In addition, Tunis features as a stop on many Mediterranean cruise ship itineraries.

Flights from the US to Tunis Carthage International Airport usually require a change in a European city, connecting to the national airline, Tunis Air, Air France, or Eurowings.

Penn Alumni and friends were lucky to visit Carthage, as well as the ancient site of Dougga in northern Tunisia, in fall 2019 on a Penn Alumni Travel trip “Ancient Heroes”, hosted and with custom itinerary

by Brian Rose, Ferry Curator-in-Charge of the Mediterranean Section.

Penn Alumni Travel invites alumni and friends to explore the world in the company of a Penn faculty host and with the camaraderie of like-minded, intellectually curious travelers. When you’re ready to The fall 2019 Penn Alumni Travel group at Dougga; Brian Rose, front row center, holds the Penn Alumni flag.

Photo by Emilie LaRosa.

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dream about travel again, or to be added to the mailing list, please visit www.alumni.upenn.edu/travel.

FRAGMENTS OF CARTHAGE REDISCOVERED

The Bursa (acropolis) at Carthage, where excavations exposed comfortable Punic residences beneath the supports of large, Roman-era buildings. Photo by Emilie LaRosa.

Jean Macintosh Turfa, Ph.D., is a Consulting Scholar in the Penn Museum Mediterranean Section and a specialist in the Etruscan civilization.

FOR FURTHER READING the sommerville collection and related collections:

on the controversy over punic infant sacrifice:

Sommerville, M. 1901. Sands of Sahara. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott.

Brown, S.S. 1992. Late Carthaginian Child Sacrifice and Sacrificial Monuments in Their Mediterranean Context. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.

Berges, D. 2002. Antike Siegel und Glasgemmen der Sammlung Maxwell Sommerville. Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern.

Leskov, A.M. 2008. The Maikop Treasure. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Turfa, J.M. 2019. Two Punic Stelae Rediscovered in Philadelphia. Near Eastern Archaeology 82(2): 82–88. on carthage:

Hoyos, D. 2010. The Carthaginians. London: Routledge.

Moscati, S. 1997. Stelai, pp. 364–379 in The Phoenicians, ed. Sabatino Moscati. (Reprint: originally an exhibition, Milan, 1988). New York: Rizzoli.

Schwartz, J., F. Houghton, R. Macciarelli, and L. Bondioli. 2010. Skeletal Remains from Punic Carthage Do Not Support Systematic Sacrifice of Infants. PL0S ONE 5(2): e9177doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0009177.

Xella, P., J. Quinn, V. Melchiorri, and P. van Dommelen.

2013. Phoenician Bones of Contention. Antiquity 87: 1199–1207.

Lafrenz Samuels, K., and M.F. Martin. 2016. Women’s Ritual Practice in the Western Phoenician and Punic World.” pp. 533–551 in Women in Antiquity, eds.

Stephanie Lynn Budin and Jean MacIntosh Turfa.

London: Routledge. (See pp. 540–546 for content specifically relevant to Carthage.)

Mendleson, C. 2003. Catalogue of Punic Stelai in The British Museum. (British Museum Occasional Paper 98.) London: The British Museum.

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IN THE LABS

Pivoting in CAAM GETTING HANDS-ON LEARNING TO REMOTE STUDENTS

BY KATHERINE M. MOORE

THIS HAS BEEN A YEAR of teaching remotely in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM). Social distancing has challenged CAAM’s commitment to student work with Museum collections, hands-on experiences with real materials, and chances to apply key instrumental methods in the Center’s labs.

This fall, the 54 students in CAAM’s foundation course Food and Fire: Archaeological Science in the Laboratory were spread across 16 time zones. I was still hopeful that students could become familiar with materials and artifacts as they learned archaeological research methods, and could demonstrate critical thinking while choosing an individual project.

Food and Fire students used Canvas software for readings and assignments and met on Zoom for live classes, recitations, “office hours,” and “lab hours.”

Academic Engagement staff produced custom videos about key collections and we pulled from the Museum’s archives of recorded lectures and presentations.

Combining in-person sessions and digital resources let

the students get to know me and teaching assistants Chelsea Cohen and Chris LaMack, but fell short of our intentions for hands-on, touch-based learning. We longed for our students to engage with the real thing.

To get materials into students’ hands, we shipped each one a custom kit of modern flint, obsidian, copper ores, clay, textile fibers, and animal bone. Small artifacts (coins, pottery sherds, and beads from the long-ago 20th century) let students practice observing, measuring, and describing unfamiliar objects. A simple measuring tool (a 10 m length of string) for a mapping project was also a cordage sample. Each student ordered a USB plug-in digital microscope to observe and photograph details of their materials. In dorms, kitchens, and backyards, students mixed clay with temper and water, cold-worked copper, and cleaned and spun their own raw cotton and wool.

The material kit was a welcome dose of real life in a semester dominated by computer screens. Students posted microphotos and commentary of experimental results each week. Hands-on experiences could extend

Sherd of Nubian vessel, E9021.21 with reconstruction of decoration and 3D model of vessel.

Submitted by Angela Schmitt.

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Experimental glass bifaces with pressure-flaked serrations prepared by Natasha Rohacs; glass Kimberly point from Oceanian Collection, 31-33-114.

beyond a 50-minute class period, so students could observe as physical changes appeared over several hours or days, or could start again when results were unexpected (or failed). The advantage of enough time stood out with the water flotation experiment, where tiny soil samples with modern microartifacts were opened on Monday and processed by water separation and dried at home during the week. Students met with archaeobotanist Chantel White during recitation to share images of finds and ask questions. In September, CAAM’s digital archaeologist Jason Herrmann got everyone outside to map and record grave markers in cemeteries across the world. During an average semester, this reflective and self-directed learning sometimes gets lost as students rotate between lab stations in our faster-paced classroom labs.

For the final project, keepers of collections in the Museum’s curatorial sections approved a list of objects with interesting and important stories and lots of visual detail. Collections staff took detailed pictures of the chosen artifacts, and Penn Libraries’ emergency digital services scanned background materials from books and journals to post on Canvas. After students absorbed as much as they could from excavation records and photographs and wrote preliminary descriptions, we met the objects in the Collection Study Room. Objects were live-streamed with a document camera for closeups and a digital microscope for views up to 100x. Students scrutinized surfaces, asked for measurement data, and

got a chance to request specific views and information to be posted to the class website. The final papers showed some tradeoffs: students got the scale and detail of the objects, and were successful in drawing connections between object, maker, archaeological context. The documentary records of the object and the other items that had been found with the pieces were more important to the students than specific physical details. Though remote from their real object, some students rummaged back in their material kits to test some of their ideas about how hard a particular material was to work (very hard!) or how much skill a simple item might demand from an artisan (lots!). This impulse to experience the work of creating the artifacts confirmed what I’d seen in past years: that direct experiences with materials are critical to understanding the archaeological record.

I have renewed appreciation for the Museum’s role in visual education, even in a course focused on individual objects. The visual experience of seeing many wonderful objects in one room sparks broad understanding and leads students to attach more meaning to artifacts that they had a chance to study intensively. Students are eager to get back into the Museum so that they can see more, now that they know how to understand the objects that they will see.

Katherine M. Moore is Mainwaring Teaching Specialist for Archaeozoology in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials.

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LEARNING LESSONS: SERVING OUR PUBLIC AUDIENCES

Steps Towards Decolonizing a Museum SHARING DIVERSE VOICES

BY KEVIN A. SCHOTT AND RAQUEL QUINONES

THE YEAR 2020 has brought many changes to museums. Among the most important are the actions towards decolonization. The artifacts at the Penn Museum are from myriad cultures, but the narrative around them rarely comes from those cultures themselves. Instead, museum experts, mostly trained in colonial and European traditions, interpret the artifacts, opening the door to white supremacist perspectives. Acknowledging that, the Learning and Public Engagement staff is taking steps to decolonize our teaching.

Decolonizing is a multi-pronged process. It includes sharing the voices of marginalized people, welcoming more diverse learners, employing a diverse teaching staff, and building relationships outside our building. Although this work will take a long time and be ongoing, some early steps have already begun.

All of our lessons now include a land acknowledgment of Lenapehoking, the ancestral lands of the Unami Lenape tribe, where the Penn Museum rests. We have updated some cultural terms in programs. For example, our Egyptian programming now uses the name Kemet, the word the ancient Egyptians had for their country.

Another example of this work comes from our Native American Voices tour. We’ve added a short video from the YouTube channel Kel’s a Funny Girl. In it, the creator, Raquel Quinones, shares some of the slang she uses with friends on the Spirit Lake Reservation in North Dakota. The video is fun and relatable for our school aged audience. It also gives a peek into the culture of at least one tribe today.

For the rest of this article, I’ve invited Kel to tell you more about her channel.

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Jason Garcia’s piece, Miscommunication, on display at the Penn Museum, highlights the importance of talking about youth culture.

A slide from an updated virtual tour of the Egyptian Collection.

YouTuber Raquel Quinones created the successful Kel’s a Funny Girl channel.

Photo by Raquel Quinones.

MY NAME IS RAQUEL QUINONES, and I am a Dakota Sioux from the Spirit Lake Tribe in Saint Michael, North Dakota. I’m mixed—my dad is Puerto Rican and my mom is Native American. My mom raised me with the best of both worlds. I spent half of my life living on the reservation and the other half living in the city.

I started my YouTube channel seven years ago in the hopes of finding an outlet to express myself and to have Native American representation.

So with all of that, I wanted to talk to y’all about Native American humor and share with you one of my blog posts about that. If you watch any of my videos, I have a big sense of humor and a lot of that influence is from living on the reservation.

NATIVE AMERICAN HUMOR 101 1. If a Native person makes fun of you, that means they like you.

I get this all of the time when I’m making fun of a new friend—“Oh my gosh Kel, you’re so mean”—but I’m actually not trying to be mean, I enjoy you as a friend and I’m letting you know by making fun of you.

Teasing or “roasting” each other is a love language on the reservation, and if we make fun of you, that means that we like you and we’ve accepted you as one of our own.

2. If a Native person ignores you, that’s when you should be worried.

Native people can never be fake; we are the realest people you will ever meet. So when we tease you, that means we like you, but if we’re not teasing you and

we’re quiet around you, then that means we aren’t comfortable around you and we probably don’t like you. Like I said, teasing is a love language for us and if we are in situations where we can’t express that, it’s like a fish being out of water, we need to express humor because it’s who we are as people.

3. Making jokes/laughing helps us cope.

Life as a Native American is a unique experience, having faced many challenges. We have had oppression hit our communities for over 400 years.

A way that we “deal” and “cope” with our feelings is joking about our situations and laughing about them, because that’s the thing that has made us resilient for all of this time. No matter what has happened to us, we can still have a great attitude and put a smile on our face because you cannot break us. We are still here and we are not going anywhere. In the meantime, we’re going to have high spirits, laugh a lot and make fun of you while doing all of that.

Native American humor is very dark. I believe that since we’ve been through so much throughout history, the way we’ve prevailed is through our humor. I know personally that a lot of non-native people haven’t understood my humor; they hear it and they get very uncomfortable. So today I wanted to educate you guys in understanding Native humor a little better, so that it won’t sound like a foreign language.

So those are my three points about Native American humor for ya’ll. I hope you guys learned something and the next time you’re around a Native person, you can look for some of these characteristics. I enjoyed teaching you guys this and I’m excited for you to learn more.

If y’all are interested in more information about me, you can go subscribe to my YouTube channel “Kel’s A Funny Girl”; you can also follow me on Instagram @kelsafunnygirl and on Twitter @Kelsafunnygirl. Thank y’all so much!

Kevin Schott is Associate Director for Interpretive Programs in the Learning and Public Engagement Department; Raquel Quinones is a Native American YouTube Personality and Social Media Influencer.

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MEMBERSHIP MATTERS

Member News Special Offer!

Limited-Edition Puzzle

Loren Eiseley Society Member Robin Potter, WG80, shows off her completed custom Penn Museum puzzle.

Photo by Peter Gould.

For a limited time, members can receive a customdesigned jigsaw puzzle depicting some of our most iconic objects. This 1,000-piece puzzle, featuring original illustrations by Museum Graphic Designer Remy Perez, is available to all members who join or upgrade to any level in our Expedition Circle (membership gifts of $250+) by June 30.

Make your gift at www.penn.museum/membership or call 215.898.5093 for more information.

Exploring More— From a Distance!

Tukufu Zuberi taught the four-week Deep Dig course “Africa and the World” in February, and Simon Martin gave participants an introduction to reading Maya hieroglyphs like those in the monument pictured with him here, in his Deep Dig course in March.

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Virtual Programs have kept members exploring this winter. In February, members took a virtual tour of our newest exhibition Invisible Beauty: The Art of Archaeological Science, with exhibition curators Dr. Marie-Claude Boileau and Dr. Sarah Linn. The silver lining of virtual tours? The ability to meet students— some current, some now in graduate programs across the country—whose research forms the exhibition, and who wouldn’t otherwise be able to join us onsite.

Members also enjoyed previews of our popular Deep Dig series, including “Africa and the World” by Dr. Tukufu Zuberi, curator of the Africa Galleries, and “How to Read Maya Hieroglyphs: A Beginner’s Guide”

by Dr. Simon Martin, Associate Curator of the American Section. At our annual Curator’s Party in March, Dr. Brian Rose, Curator-in-Charge of the Mediterranean Section, shared the latest findings from his research at Gordion, Turkey—where he was able to have a short dig season in 2020—including the first royal woman’s tomb excavated at that site.

For upcoming member previews and our latest members’ events, explore our calendar at www.penn. museum/calendar.

Member Spotlight IAN SELTZER, C09

Ian Seltzer, C09, is a member of the Museum’s Young Alumni Council, a volunteer group that helps create strategies for student and young adult engagement at the Museum.

He is also a Museum member and new supporter of the Museum’s Student Internship program.

GROWING UP, my father, who was Wharton Class of '78 and is a recent recipient of the Penn Alumni Award of Merit, would take me to the Museum to see the Egyptian Galleries. It was a pivotal experience that instilled in me a passion for history at a young age. Prior to becoming a Penn student, that was one of my fondest memories on campus. When I was an undergrad, I pursued a history major and that included an anthropology class that was held at the Museum.

My close friends and I were DJs at the student radio station, WQHS, which was based near the South Street Bridge.

We found ourselves heading in that direction regularly, so the Museum became a place for us to congregate, which was a special experience for me to share with them.

For me, what makes the Museum unique at Penn is that regardless of your school affiliation—the College, Wharton, Engineering, Nursing and so on—it’s a place where you can have shared experiences. It’s an unbelievable space where the University can engage the larger community: whether it’s having an educational experience for a young child growing up in Philadelphia or a parent, learning alongside their children.

I work in media and entertainment, so the rebranding of the Museum has been an area where

Photo by Ian Seltzer

I’ve contributed as part of the Young Alumni Council.

In our meetings we think about how the Museum communicates with the Penn community, as well as the larger Philadelphia community. In our recent Council meeting, we learned about the Museum’s effort to make all internships paid, as part of its mission to serve diverse populations. In my own career, internships were critical for getting from point A to point B and creating opportunities, so I felt that this was a fantastic initiative that I wanted to support. Doing this transitions diversity within the Museum from an aspirational matter to a functional one: it enables the participation of new voices and perspectives to shape the Museum.

I live in New York City and I was not able to see the Museum’s renovations before the pandemic, so when travel is advisable again, I can’t wait to see the changes that have been made. I would love to see the Sphinx— and to re-live my childhood by visiting the Egyptian Galleries. I’m also incredibly excited for the Museum’s plan to feature new narratives in history. I’ve only seen pictures of the new facilities, but everything looks fantastic, and I’m excited to see how things have evolved from the idea phase to execution. I will be making a visit in the future and I will continue to support the Museum!

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WELCOME NEWS

Welcoming New Collaborations, Faces, Initiatives, and Funders Fostering Global Interdisciplinary Collaboration IN AN EFFORT to foster global interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange, the Penn Museum has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Shiv Nadar University’s Center for Archaeology, Heritage and Museum Studies (CAHMS). The program aims to facilitate scholarly cooperation, communication, and exchange, while enhancing educational opportunities for students and professionals.

Potential areas of cooperation include faculty exchanges, undergraduate and graduate student research opportunities, and shared training initiatives in archaeological sciences, research methods, digital archaeology, and heritage studies.

“Shiv Nadar University has established itself as an important center for research, education, and public engagement in India. CAHMS offers an innovative and holistic approach to theory, method, and representation of the South Asian past in contemporary contexts, which well aligns with the public and academic missions of the Penn Museum,” said Dr. Stephen J. Tinney, the Penn

Museum’s Deputy Director, Chief Curator, and Head of Collections and Research. “This welcome partnership will advance our collective commitment to scholarship, professional training, and outreach in this important area of the world, and we look forward to a long and fruitful collaboration.”

Dr. Partha Chatterjee, Dean of International Partnerships, Professor, and Head of the Department of Economics at Shiv Nadar University, said the MOU reflects their steadfast focus on partnering with the greatest institutions across the world to strengthen engagement and pursue cutting-edge research. “We are delighted to join hands with Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania in this effort and are confident about building deep collaboration in the areas of archaeology, heritage and museum studies; an area that has immense potential and a true reflection of multidisciplinarity at SNU,” Dr. Chatterjee said. “This is yet another step in offering education and experiences of truly global standards to our students and faculty.”

New Gifts and Grants Advance New Galleries THE PENN MUSEUM is pleased to announce lead gift commitments from the Giorgi Family Foundation to name the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery, scheduled to open on the Museum’s Upper Level in fall 2022, and from an anonymous donor to name the large, central Tomb Chapel on the Lower Level of the upcoming galleries of ancient Egypt and Nubia. Installation of these galleries will follow renovation of the Museum’s historic Egyptian Wing, including much-needed air conditioning and electrical and mechanical upgrades, as well as adding individual study spaces and a seminar room to the storerooms,

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expanding access to the collections for students and researchers. We are pleased to also announce the award of a $750,000 Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities toward this renovation, to be provided once the Museum has raised $3,000,000 in additional gifts from other donors. Additional support for these gallery projects has been provided by Board members Frederick J. Manning and Clare Gordon. The Museum is deeply grateful to these individuals and funders for their generous lead support, which advance the next phase of its Building Transformation project.

Renderings showing concept design for the (top) Eastern Mediterranean Gallery and (bottom) entrance experience for the Ancient Egypt and Nubia Galleries.

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WELCOME NEWS

Welcome New Development Diversity Liaison THE PENN MUSEUM was pleased to welcome in November 2020 a new member of its Development team: Muriel Patricia Clifford, who—in a new role as Development Diversity Liaison—is increasing awareness of our Museum and its galleries and programs through personal outreach. A native of Philadelphia, Patricia has a diverse background as a communications professional with extensive and progressive contributions to the Philadelphia region in public and media relations and special events. She was a longtime feature columnist for The Philadelphia Tribune, the nation’s oldest African American newspaper, and has also written for The Philadelphia Sunday SUN and the South Jersey Journal. Patricia has been recognized by The Links, Inc., Philadelphia Chapter and the School District of Philadelphia for her volunteer efforts and community service, and has received numerous awards including The National Coalition of 100 Black Women’s Heritage Award.

Patricia Clifford welcomes new and diverse audiences to the Penn Museum to #meetmeatthesphinx.

New Member of the Board of Advisors THE PENN MUSEUM extends a warm welcome to the newest member of its Board of Advisors Clare Gordon, who joined the Board for its fall 2020 meeting on November 11. A graduate of Yale University who, for the past 30 years, has worked with her husband Bob Gordon in the acquisition and development of San Francisco real estate, Clare became a passionate advocate for the Penn Museum after a tour with Ferry Curator-in-Charge of the Mediterranean Section Brian Rose in 2018, as her son Ross graduated from Penn Arts and Sciences. The Gordons have traveled widely for the past 35 years, including living in Paris and Rome, and visit archaeological and anthropological sites wherever they can. “Whether it’s Abu Simbel, Petra, Machu Picchu, Borobudur, the Valley of the Kings, Angkor Wat, Neolithic UAE cave dwellings, or Polynesian marae,” says Clare, “we are inspired and enlightened by the breadth and variety of human creativity and ingenuity.”

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(Left to right) Bob, Clare, and Ross Gordon in their hometown San Francisco.

Ancient Maya Politics by Simon Martin Sweeps Prestigious PROSE Awards WE ARE PLEASED TO SHARE the news that Ancient Maya Politics: A Political Anthropology of the Classic Period 150–900 CE by Simon Martin, Associate Curator and Keeper, American Section, has won three Awards for Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PROSE Awards) from the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

A panel of 23 judges reviewed 595 entries to this year’s awards program. In January, Ancient Maya Politics, published by Cambridge University Press, was named as one of 45 Category Winners, as best in Biological Anthropology, Ancient History & Archaeology.

When AAP then announced in February the winners of PROSE Excellence Awards, which recognize scholarly publications that are best-in-class in five categories, Dr. Martin’s volume had won the award for Excellence in Humanities but also took the program’s top prize, the prestigious R.R. Hawkins Award—the first time that Cambridge University Press has received that honor.

In Ancient Maya Politics Dr. Martin uses recently deciphered inscriptions and fresh archaeological finds to answer a simple question: how did a multitude of small kingdoms survive for some 600 years without being subsumed within larger states or empires?

He is, according to PROSE Chief Judge Nigel Fletcher-Jones, Ph.D., “… a master of the material in terms of epigraphy, archaeology, and the theoretical

aspects of political organization in the past.” Dr. FletcherJones continued: “Ancient Maya Politics is a major advance in our understanding of the Maya and deserves recognition at the highest level. Cambridge University Press are also to be commended for producing an attractively designed volume that readily draws the reader into the discussion.”

The PROSE Awards were established in 1976 to recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing by celebrating the authors, editors, and publishers whose landmark works have made significant advancements in their respective fields of study each year, and are judged by peer publishing professionals, librarians, and medical professionals. The R.R. Hawkins Award was also created in 1976 to recognize outstanding scholarly works in all disciplines of the arts and sciences, and named for Reginald Robert Hawkins (1902–1999), who started his career at the New York Public Library as a reference assistant in 1926 and gradually worked his way to become Chief of the Science and Technology Division.

Strenghtening Inclusive Practice THE PENN MUSEUM IS PLEASED to have been accepted into the OF/BY/FOR ALL Change Network.

Founded in 2018, OF/BY/FOR ALL is a California-based, non-profit organization working in a distributed way to connect, strengthen, and accelerate inclusive practice by museums around the world through a year-long program. Its methods help organizations connect with their local communities in effective, authentic ways, based on the fundamental equation: OF + BY = FOR ALL. The more an organization is representative OF its community, the more people feel seen and heard.

The more programming is created BY the community, the more people feel ownership. The more programming is FOR the community, the more everyone wants to participate.

Program participation will give us access to a wide range of tools and resources as well as global peer network of members facing similar challenges, and be an accelerator for change within our broader work in diversity, equity, and inclusion. We look forward to sharing our journey in future issues.

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ARTIFACT PERSPECTIVE

Blood in a Box WRESTLING WITH SKIN AND HISTORY THROUGH AN MBILA

BY GABRIEL JERMAINE VANLANDINGHAM-DUNN

AS A BLACK AMERICAN CHILD growing up in West Baltimore, Maryland during the 1980s, I was fortunate enough to have access to my Southern grandparents who were born in the 1920s. Through them, I not only learned family history and folklore about race, gender, and self-preservation in the face of racist/colonial rule in the South, but I was also taught the importance of claiming my space and recognizing right from wrong through holding people and places accountable. And this is something I think about whenever I enter the doors of the Penn Museum, where I work in the Learning and Public Engagement department.

In particular, the newly renovated Africa Galleries evoke many mixed feelings for me. Like most children, I went with my school classes on trips to the Smithsonian museums every year and was allowed to see the wonders of the world behind glass enclosures. These “cages” held items and artifacts, not unlike things that I’d find in my family’s home. Quilts created by Black women, statues of varying spiritual/religious significance, and small African instruments were viewed by thousands of Black and Brown faces each day. Yet, we didn’t realize that

Artist in the center of Cologne, Germany, playing the Balafon. Photo by Daniil Belosheikin / Shutterstock.com, 2017.

these items still had relevant use in the lives from which they were taken. We didn’t think about these items having use in our own lives. We weren’t as aware as we are now.

In the Africa Galleries sits an instrument that very much mirrors a huge part of my current life. While

Early 20th century mbila, on display in the Africa Galleries. 29-59-95A.

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Walt Dickerson performing on vibraphone at Jazzhouse Montmartre Copenhagen 1964. Photo by Jan Persson/ Getty Images.

labeled as an Mbila (Xylophone) from Angola (object number 29-59-95A), it is more commonly referred to as a balafon (or balaphone). The small, wooden instrument sits low to the ground with 16 keys that, when struck, create a beautiful ringing sound. A few years ago, I started teaching myself the vibraphone (or vibraharp).

My instrument is a hybrid of the balafon and the scales of a piano. Large in size, the vibraphone has been closely associated with the Black American musical tradition known as Jazz (though many of us reject this term and prefer the name Black American Music). I have spent years studying the work of vibists such as Bobby Hutcherson, Lionel Hampton, Milt Jackson, and, my favorite, Walt Dickerson.

There have been many times while, on my lunch break, I have stood in front of the balafon on display and

felt great unease at its existence in a case. Although our Museum records show the instrument was collected

by Amandus Johnson on a research trip funded by Henry C. Mercer and others, I am not convinced it was acquired on the best of terms. More importantly, I think of my two young nephews to whom I give music history lessons.

These two beautiful Black boys have had their lives flipped upside down by the pandemic and have remained brave, loving, and inquisitive through it all. So how am I supposed to answer their questions of why such a relevant part of our Black lives is locked away—within the zoo of colonialism — when they should be learning from its tones and history?

Gabriel Vanlandingham-Dunn is the School Visit Coordinator in the Penn Museum’s Learning and Public Engagement Department, and a professional writer, music historian, and DJ.

Spring 2021

67

New Titles in Archaeology from the Penn Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Press ~ Order online for a 30% discount ~ The Roman Peasant Project 2009–2014 Excavating the Roman Rural Poor

Edited by Kim Bowes

The Material Fall of Roman Britain, 300–525 CE Carolyn D. Dillian

This two-volume set examines the spaces, architecture, diet, agriculture, market interactions, and movement habitus of nonelite rural dwellers in a region of southern Tuscany, Italy, during the Roman period.

Although lowland Britain in 300 CE had been as Roman as any province in the empire, in the generations on either side of 400, urban life, the economy, and the state collapsed. Marshalling a wealth of archaeological evidence, Robin Fleming charts this collapse, and its role in making the world we characterize as early medieval.

2021 | 824 pages | 8 1/2 x 11 | 358 b/w, 22 color illus.; 142 tables ISBN 978-1-949057-07-2 | Hardcover | $120.00

Jun 2021 | 296 pages | 6 x 9 | 22 b/w ISBN 978-0-8122-5244-6 | Hardcover | $45.00

Misadventures in Archaeology

Religion in the Art of Archaic and Classical Greece

The Life and Career of Charles Conrad Abbott

Tyler Jo Smith

A comprehensive portrait of the controversial self-taught archaeologist C. C. Abbott.

Featuring illustrations of mostly smallscale objects, Religion in the Art of Archaic and Classical Greece examines what objects and images can tell us about the experiences and impressions of ancient Greek religion.

2020 | 288 pages | 6 x 9 | 32 b/w illus.

ISBN 978-1-949057-05-8 | Hardcover | $55.00

Jun 2021 | 476 pages | 7 x 10 | 216 b/w, 16 color illus.

ISBN 978-0-8122-5281-1 | Hardcover | $89.95

King Seneb-Kay’s Tomb and the Necropolis of a Lost Dynasty at Abydos

Art/ifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World

Josef Wegner and Kevin Cahail

Jun 2021 | 504 pages | 6 x 9 | 109 b/w, 18 color illus.

ISBN 978-1-949057-11-9 | Hardcover | $85.00

Carolyn D. Dillian and Charles A. Bello

his volume assembles leading Near Eastern art historians, archaeologists, and philologists to examine and apply critical contemporary approaches to the arts and artifacts of the ancient Near East.

The contributions in the volume, which include a comprehensive first chapter by the editor and twelve paired chapters (each of which explores a key theme of the volume through a specific case study), are divided into six sections: Representation, Context, Complexity, Materiality, Space, and Time | Afterlives.

A number of sub-themes and questions also thread through the volume as a whole: how might art historical, archaeological, anthropological, and philological approaches to the Near East complement and inform each other? How do word and image relate? And how might the field of Near Eastern studies not only adapt and apply approaches developed in other fields but also contribute to critical contemporary discourses? The volume is unified both by the themes that thread through it and by the comprehensive first chapter in the volume, which explores the status of Near Eastern arts and artifacts as simultaneously non-Western and ancient and as neither of these and which provides a larger theoretical framework for issues addressed in the volume as a whole.

Edited by Karen Sonik

Karen Sonik is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History, Auburn University.

Sonik

Art/ifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World

Jun 2021 | 408 pages | 8 1/2 x 11 40 b/w, 274 color illus.; 9 tables ISBN 978-1-949057-09-6 | Hardcover | $120.00

T

Art/ifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World edited by Karen Sonik

From left to right: (1) Katherine and Leonard Woolley excavating at Ur (courtesy Penn Museum; Image no. 191209). (2) Sir C. Leonard Woolley holding plaster cast of bullheaded lyre at the site of Ur (courtesy Penn Museum; Image no. 191189). (3) 1.13b sound box constructed with decorations (following inlay surviving on a different lyre) painted by Mary Louise Baker (courtesy Penn Museum; Image no. 250852). (4) Photo of Bull-Headed Lyre in the Penn Museum’s renovated Middle East Galleries (photo by Eric Sucar, University of Pennsylvania).

Penn Museum Philadelphia www.penn.museum ISBN 978-1-949057-11-9 Cover design: Ardeth P. Anderson

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