Caring For Culture: Introducing Teens to Museum Conservation

By Lu Denegre

All photos by Emily Hirshorn

On June 4th, 2022, with the help of funding from the Museum Council of Greater Philadelphia, the Conservation and Learning Programs departments hosted “Caring for Culture”, a hands-on introduction to conservation for teens. We had a great time and got some good feedback, and look forward to welcoming another group of teens this year on June 3rd 2023!

(If you’re a teen in the Philly area, you can register here for this year’s workshop)

Last year, 24 students arrived at the museum for a day of activities. The workshop began with introductions and a presentation by Senior Project Conservator Molly Gleeson about the basics of museum conservation. What kind of work does it involve? Why do we do it and what can damage cultural heritage collections?  

Molly Gleeson addresses Caring For Culture Participants in Widener Auditorium, and a diagram of the Agents of Deterioration (from A Guide to Risk Management of Cultural Heritage (p. 27), ICCROM, 2016).

Next, participants were led in smaller groups on a tour of the Museum’s conservation lab spaces by Head Conservator Lynn Grant. They got to see the X-Ray room, the photo studio, prep room, and main lab. Lynn and Graduate Intern Nylah Byrd spoke about the different treatments a large wall painting, a cartonnage mask, and a stone sculpture have undergone. These objects will be included in the upcoming reinstallation of the Ancient Egypt and Nubia Galleries and have collectively required different types of imaging, storage mounts, cleaning, and structural and aesthetic fills. 

Lynn Grant leads a tour of the conservation lab
Nylah Byrd talks about the treatment of a cartonnage mask

For rest of the morning, the groups were led into the galleries by a member of the conservation department to do some documentation of their own. Each participant chose an object in the galleries to condition report and diagram. Condition reporting is one of the first things you learn as a conservator and is the first important step in assessing an object’s needs before starting treatment. This activity offered opportunities to look for real life examples of condition issues, agents of deterioration, preventative conservation steps, and mountmaking.

Participants observing a strategy for a large fill on an object in the Middle East Gallery
Completing condition report worksheets for an object chosen in the galleries

After a sunny lunch in the Warden Garden, participants came back in for some hands-on activities. Groups rotated between three stations: cleaning, close looking, and ceramic reassembly. These stations introduced some of the beginning skills needed by a conservator in training. 

At the cleaning station, teens learned to roll their own cotton swabs to gently remove grime from the surface of a dirty tile. They also applied warm agar gel to learn how we loosen up and remove grime without using too much water on more sensitive objects or more stubborn dirt. 

A participant swab cleans a dirty tile

At the close looking station, teens used a Dino-lite digital microscope to get up close and personal with some study objects. A UV light setup showed that the way materials fluoresce differently under Ultra-Violet light can help identify unknown substances. 

Conservator Julia Commander guides participants through using a Dino-lite microscope

At the ceramic reassembly station, teams worked to puzzle out the correct location of sherds and reconstruct a ceramic object. Small sandboxes, blue tape, and clamps to hold everything in place are essential tools for gluing a ceramic back together. 

If students tried their hand at each table and still had time to spare, there were also individual activities on color matching and inpainting prepared for some down time. 

We were happy to see such enthusiastic attendance of this program last year and hope we get to meet some more future conservators at the workshop next month! If you or someone you know would like to participate, you can find more info and register here for this year’s workshop!

Mysterious bits from Nespekashuti

I’ve written before about mysterious things we’ve found during conservation treatment of our mummies (see this blogpost about the stuff we found at the bottom of Wilfreda’s crate). As I’ve been working on Nespekashuti, I’ve found some puzzling little bits at the bottom of his coffin and caught in his linen wrappings.

Here are a couple piles of detached and in most cases completely deteriorated linen, which needed to be removed as I’ve worked on Nespekashuti:

Piles of deteriorated linen wrappings and other materials removed from Nespekashuti during conservation treatment.

Piles of deteriorated linen wrappings and other materials removed from Nespekashuti and his coffin during conservation treatment.

In these piles, I found the mysterious bits. Some of these things I can recognize, but figuring out exactly what they are and how and why they got there is another story.

Here are some photomicrographs:

Feathers found with Nespekashuti, 7.5X magnification

Feathers found with Nespekashuti, 7.5x magnification

This first one is easy – these are feathers, of course – little grey plumaceous body feathers from who knows what kind of bird. There are some good resources out there for identifying feathers (see more info at the very bottom of our Learn More! page) but for little feathers like this, and non-experts like me, we need to resort to microscopic analysis by an expert from another institution in order to attempt identification. I did take some photomicrographs of the barbules from one of these feathers, which may be their most diagnostic feature, but again, I lack the experience necessary to make sense of what I’m seeing through the microscope. Just for fun, this is what the barbules look like:

Barbules of one feather found with Nespekashuti, 200x magnification.

Barbules of one feather found with Nespekashuti, 200x magnification.

We also found these:

Bird bones found with Nespekashuti, 7.5x magnification

Bird bones found with Nespekashuti, 7.5x magnification

and this:

Two fused bird vertebrae found with Nespekashuti, 7.5x magnification

Two fused bird vertebrae found with Nespekashuti, 7.5x magnification

These two images above show some tiny bones that were found in Nespekashuti’s coffin. I consulted Dr. Kate Moore, zooarchaeologist and Teaching Specialist in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM). She confirmed that these are bird bones, and the second image shows two articulated bird vertebrae. Dr. Moore told me that upon her initial inspection, she thinks that they may have gone through a digestive tract (think:owl pellets, and that dissection you may have done in grade school!).

And then I found a bunch of this stuff:

Found with Nespekashuti - these look like mouse or rat droppings, 7.5X magnification

Found with Nespekashuti – these look like mouse or rat droppings, 7.5X magnification

These things look a lot like mouse or rat droppings, and there’s little bits of hair caught in some of them. No one said that working on mummies is for the faint of heart!

I also found some bits of cotton, tiny pieces of wood and plant materials, and even some broken glass. We can think of lots of good stories to explain why this stuff would be found with Nespekashuti, but in the end we’re not really sure. Like I said, we are reaching out to some experts about the feathers, so I’ll keep you posted if we learn more – identifying the feathers would be exciting, and could help explain how they got there!

Conservators-in-training

Update – this post contains outdated language. We no longer use the term “mummy” and instead use “mummified human individuals” to refer to Ancient Egyptian people whose bodies were preserved for the afterlife. To read more about this decision, follow this link

….

For over 10 years, our museum has organized an “Anthropologists in the Making” Summer Camp, and today we hosted 66 of these summer campers in the Artifact Lab for an afternoon of conservation training.

IALSummerCamp1This year the camp is being held over 8 weeks, with different themes each week, including Can you Dig it?, all about archaeology, and Visions and Dreams, which explores the significance of dreams and the roles of shamans and mystics (this one is coming up in August).

The camp theme this week is Mummies Unwrapped so of course we had to give the campers a taste zxxcconservation, in addition to what they are learning about mummies and ancient Egypt.

We organized 3 different activities for the 7-13 year olds (they were split into 2 groups according to age) to test their hand and observation skills. All 3 activities were created to mimic some of the work that we’ve been doing in the Artifact Lab, including:

– an excavation station, which challenged the campers to pick out the remains of a beaded shroud from a bin of debris (similar to recovering PUM I’s beads)

IALsummercampexcavation2

– a cleaning station, where campers tried different cleaning tests to remove dirt from a painted ceramic tile (like the cleaning that we’ve been doing on our painted coffin of Tawahibre)

IALsummercampcleaning4

– a materials ID station, where the campers had the opportunity to examine “mystery” materials under magnification and then had to identify what they were looking at (an example of one of the material ID challenges we’ve encountered in the lab can be found here)

A camper compares reference materials to the magnified image of the "mystery" material on the monitor

A camper compares reference materials to the magnified image of the “mystery” material on the monitor

For each activity, we had the kids fill out worksheets to record their observations, to give them a sense of the documentation involved in our work. Before moving on to the next station, each camper needed to get their supervising conservator to sign off on their worksheet. On their way out the door, all campers received certificates declaring them “Junior Conservators for-the-day”.

certificateWe had lots of fun, not only preparing for the camp

Arts and crafts day in the Artifact Lab (left) and the painted tiles before "dirtying" them for the campers (right)

Arts and crafts day in the Artifact Lab (left) and the painted tiles before “dirtying” them for the campers (right)

but also working with the kids at each of the stations. We were impressed with their observations and how quickly they picked up on each activity (rolling swabs can be hard at first!). Special thanks to our Education Department and to all of the summer campers for increasing our department more than tenfold for the afternoon!

IALsummercampcleaning1

Polarized Light Microscopy

Our Conservation Department recently purchased a Zeiss polarized light microscope-“the best microscope on campus” according to the specialist who set it up for us, and who is knowledgeable about the other scopes in use at Penn. Having the nicest equipment around isn’t familiar territory for conservation labs, so we’re enjoying having this status, but more importantly, having such a nice piece of equipment to use.

Our new microscope installed in the Artifact Lab

Polarized light microscopy (PLM) is used for examination of specimens in many types of laboratories, including biology and geology labs. In conservation, we use PLM for identification of minute fragments from objects-anything from pigment particles to wood fragments to textile fibers. We also use this technique to examine corrosion products, salts, and other materials found on artifacts-all of this work helps us better understand what the objects are made of, their condition, and ultimately provides important information for making conservation treatment decisions.

For example, our Conservation Fellow Tessa de Alarcon, who is conducting a year-long condition survey of Penn Museum artifacts from Kourion, Cyprus, has been using PLM to examine salts present in ceramic vessels from this collection. Tessa is desalinating the ceramics to remove the salts, which likely accumulated in the ceramics in the burial environment and will cause damage if not removed. To confirm which salts are present, she removed samples of the salts and examined them under the microscope. Here is an image of one of the salt samples, which shows that there are 2 different types of salts present-nitrates and sulfates.

Magnified image of 2 types of salts present on a ceramic vessel from Kourion (400X magnification).

You can read more about Tessa’s work with the Kourion collection (and view a cool video clip!) here on the Penn Museum blog.

In the Artifact Lab, one of the first ways that I’ve used our new microscope is to examine fibers from a thread that detached from the fabric wrappings of the falcon mummy I described in a previous blogpost. Fortunately for me (but unfortunately for the poor falcon mummy!) there are lots of detached threads that were available to sample for examination under the microscope. Here is a magnified image of one of these threads:

A small detached thread from the falcon mummy’s wrappings (40X magnification). I noted that the thread has an “S” twist and the fibers are shiny.

Using our binocular microscope, I put a drop of water on the thread and teased out several individual fibers from the thread on a glass slide, and then covered the fibers with a cover slip.

This image shows all of the tiny fibers from the larger thread-it is important to examine these fibers individually in order to identify what type of textile the falcon mummy is wrapped in (40X magnification).

Once the slide was prepared, I mounted it on the polarized light microscope and examined it at 50, 100 and 200X magnification.

Fiber from falcon mummy textile wrappings (200X magnification)

Under such powerful magnification, it is possible to see features such as a very small lumen (central cavity) and nodes along the length of the fiber. These features are characteristic of flax fibers, and comparing my sample with known references, it was immediately clear that this is what it is. Flax is used to make linen, and since the majority of ancient Egyptian textiles are linen, I already had a good idea that this is what was used to make the falcon mummy-but this proves it!

You can see from this work that PLM is a very useful technique, but it also is important to have an idea about what the possibilities are for what your sample-background research and close examination before microscopy is essential.