As us anything! (on our Reddit AMA)

Posted on March 10, 2015 by mollygleeson

We open our windows in the lab twice daily, inviting our visitors to ask us anything, so why not open our windows just a bit wider, inviting anyone on the Internet to fire questions at us? We are doing just that, tomorrow, from 11:00-12:30 EST on reddit.com. I must confess that other than perusing Reddit a few times last fall while I, along with much of the rest of the world, listened to the first season of Serial, I have no experience using Reddit. According to it’s Wikipedia page, Reddit is an “entertainment, social networking, and news website” and content entries are organized by areas of interest called “subreddits.” One of the most popular subreddits is IAmA (“I am A”) where a user may post “AMAs” (Ask Me Anything).

So tomorrow, Wednesday March 11, from 11:00-12:30, Lynn Grant and I will be online for our very own AMA with the title “We are museum conservators working with ancient Egyptian artifacts in full public view, at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. Ask us anything!”

Tom Stanley, our intrepid Public Relations/Social Media Coordinator, set the AMA up, and posted instructions on how to find us on Reddit tomorrow if you’d like to follow along or ask us a question. You can find the blogpost with instructions by following this link.

Looking forward to hearing from you tomorrow!

In celebration of International Women’s Day

Posted on March 8, 2015 by mollygleeson

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day. I have been thinking about how to recognize this occasion, and the fact that March is Women’s History Month, In the Artifact Lab. First, I would be remiss not to note the Egyptian women represented here on exhibit, including Tawahibre (via her painted wooden coffin lid), Nefrina (by her painted cartonnage mask), Tanwa (a 5-year old mummified girl), and 2 unknown Roman-period women – one whose head is on exhibit, and another represented by her painted plaster funerary mask.

From left to right: Tawahibre, Nefrina, Tanwa, unknown woman’s head, unknown woman’s funerary mask

But there are some other very important women that you’ll see In the Artifact Lab as well – including the other 4 conservators in our department, Head Conservator Lynn Grant, Julie Lawson, Nina Owczarek, and Tessa de Alarcon, Research Associate Dr. Marie-Claude Boileau, and many post-graduate fellows, graduate and pre-program interns, and volunteers. Sometimes you’ll see women outside of our department working with us, such as Egyptian Section Associate Curator Jen Wegner and Assistant Keeper Jean Walker, and Dr. Janet Monge, Curator and Keeper of the Physical Anthropology Section, and we also collaborate with many women both within and outside the museum. To highlight just some of these terrific colleagues, check out the slideshow below:

Penn Museum Conservation Women from Molly Gleeson

I would have liked to include a few other women in this slideshow who we work with regularly, but unfortunately I don’t have photos of them working in the lab – notably Dr. Gretchen Hall and Dr. Naomi Miller. And then there are the women who work in other departments in the museum – I was going to make a list, but then I realized that we collaborate with all of the departments in important ways.

We are also very grateful for the women who have come before us at the museum, and I hope/plan to write another post later this month focusing on one person in particular who helped pave the way for the women not only in our museum, but in our field.

Happy International Women’s Day!

A closer look at one of our feathered friends

Posted on March 4, 2015 by mollygleeson

We have an ibis mummy in the lab, which is revealing itself to us in an unusual way.

Unlike most animal mummies in our collection, we can actually see the ibis’ remains – in this case, its feathers! It is unfortunate that the linen wrappings were damaged in the past, but this damage does provide a unique look under the bandages.

Ibis mummy, 97-121-19, from Thebes, Late Period (ca. 664-332 BCE).

While x-ray radiography revealed that there is indeed an ibis inside (the beak is a dead giveaway), the feathers provide further clues about this bird that was mummified approximately 2500 years ago.

Radiograph taken from the top down. Exposure information: 35kV, 5mA, 6 seconds. Image enhanced with flash! filter.

When researching ibis mummies, I read again and again about the African Sacred ibis (Threskiornis aethiopicus) being mummified, but there were other types of ibis in Egypt, including the Glossy ibis (Plegadis falcinellus) and the Northern Bald ibis (Geronticus eremita). I don’t know if evidence has been found that these other types of ibis were mummified, but I do know that I shouldn’t immediately assume that this particular ibis mummy contains the remains of an African Sacred ibis.

So, let’s look at the feathers, and what we can learn from them. The feathers that are exposed appear to be contour feathers that may be part of one of the wings. There are a few completely detached feather fragments in this area, so I was able to take a closer look at one small fragment under the microscope.

Left: ibis feather 7.5X magnification. Right: ibis feather 50X magnification.

The most obvious feature to note, even without a microscope, is the coloration. This feather is white and black. The African Sacred ibis has a very beautiful, distinctive, black and white plumage, so in this case the color alone may be enough to identify species.

If we can’t rely on color, what else can we learn from this feather fragment? Well, we can see that it is part of a pennaceous (rather than plumulaceous, or downy) feather, the parts of which I’ve labeled in the above images. To take an even closer look at these elements, I used our polarizing light microscope and was able to see the tiny hooklets on the barbules, which “zip” the barbules, and therefore the barbs, together.

Ibis feather 100X magnification.

The barbules of feathers can be used for identification of species, but usually barbules from plumulaceous feathers are used, as they have a very different and distinct appearance. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to any plumulaceous feathers from this ibis mummy, so this may be as far as I can go at the moment. There are other researchers, both within the field of Egyptology, but mostly in ornithology, who have spent much more time looking at ibis feather structure than I have, and of course there is DNA research, so we may learn more in the future about this ibis mummy and its feathers.

I have a special place in my heart for birds and feathers, since before coming to the Penn Museum, I worked on an extensive project on feather coloration as part of a collaborative research effort between UCLA and the Getty Conservation Institute. Click on the links below to find out more about this work:

A Collaborative Study of California Featherwork

California Featherwork: Considerations for Examination and Preservation

And to learn more about feather structure, start by following this link: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology: All About Birds: Feather Structure