On the cover: Nazire Çeltek, wife of a well-to-do full-time shepherd in her "milk room" at the summer grazing area, boiling morning milk for daily cheese and butter production. See The Women of Yassihöyük, Turkey
Photo credit: Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann
By: Anonymous
The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has been running a nationally known Collections Management Internship Program for the past twenty years. The program exposes the interns to practical aspects of managing archaeological and ethnographic collections through day-to-day activities. This year our four interns—Molly Greenfield, Christina Pappas, Gina Spezialetti, and Sara Summers—will focus […]
By: Elin C. Danien
Today when the Internet is almost ubiquitous and air travel is as common as a walk down the lane, it’s difficult to grasp the immense difficulties that Mayanist archaeologists faced in the early years of the l9th century. The University of Pennsylvania Museum’s excavation of Piedras Negras provides both a reminder of those early days […]
By: Michael Danti
Today, the ancient city of Palmyra, the caravan center and oasis of the Syrian Desert (Fig. I), evokes romantic images of Roman temples and palaces nestled among palms, or Queen Zenobia and her daring revolt against Rome in AD 269-70. Today Tadmor, as the ruins are known, is one of the Syrian Arab Republic’s most […]
By: Leslie Guy
Beginning in January 2002 the Museum will be relocating almost 100,000 ethnographic artifacts from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania into the Mainwaring Wing, a new 35,000 square foot storage and research facility. There is tremendous variety in the objects contained within these collections, from minuscule Inuit fishing equipment, fragile Japanese war prints, and delicate […]
By: Ayşe Gursan-Salzmann
It is widely acknowledged that women are the mainstay of household operations. especially in rural agricultural communities, and their contributions encompass in large part field labor, food processing, and traditional crafts. In subsistence economies these constitute unpaid, “fill-in” tasks. However, this portrait has been changing rapidly in Turkey in the last 50-60 years, specifically in […]
By: John H. Walker
The Amazon River moves more water and sediment than any other river in the world, and at the mouth of the river, fresh water extends for forty miles out into the Atlantic Ocean. The area drained by this mighty river is about the same size as the continental United States and comparatively little archaeological research […]
By: Benjamin Pykles
A hallmark of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the strictly observed health code known as the Word of Wisdom, which prohibits the consumption of tobacco, alcohol, coffee, tea, and harmful drugs. Less known is that the Word of Wisdom has not always been as strictly adhered to as it is presently. […]
By: Mac Marston
The two main components of archaeological fieldwork are locating sites and then excavating them. Site survey is necessary to locate culturally important areas for excavation unless they remain obvious and well known to locals. At the opposite end of the spectrum are sites like bomas, the traditional settlements of the Maasai people of Kenya. These […]
By: Alex Pezzati
Of all the brilliant minds that have lit up the firmament of ancient Maya studies, there is none that arouses as much admiration, inspiration, and outright devotion as Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1909-1985). After seminal studies on the architecture and sculpture of the Maya, Proskouriakoff made her greatest contribution by going against the current and discovering the […]
By: Ann Blair Brownlee and Jean MacIntosh Turfa
In October of 2002, three new galleries will join “The Ancient Greek World” to form a suite devoted to the cultures of ancient Greece and Italy. In developing “The Etruscan World,” we had the wonderful experience of working with one of the most important Etruscan collections in the country. Although many of the objects are […]
