Volume 48 / Issue 3
On the Cover: Ladakhi roads, now paved for vehicles, often follow the same difficult routes traders once traveled from region to region. Inset, in a small town near Kargil, curious children listen to an elder explain his role in Ladakhi trade.
Photo by Abdul Nasir Khan. Inset photo by Jacqueline H. Fewkes.
Trade at the Crossroads of Continents
Northern India's Ladakh Region
By: Jacqueline H. Fewkes
Historical trade routes across Asia brought together diverse peoples and created markets that were highly cosmopolitan areas of intercultural contact. While individual traders from many different cultures met in these marketplaces, the existence of trading middlemen typically meant that many long-distance trade networks were actually the result of multiple shorter-distance exchanges. Thus commercial goods from […]
Albert A. Giesecke (1883-1968)
A Philadelphian in the Land of the Incas
By: Daniel W. Gade
A University of Pennsylvania graduate born in Philadelphia played a largely unrecognized but important part in recovering and promoting Peru’s rich pre-Columbian past. While most people probably have not heard of Albert Giesecke, for he wrote sparingly in English and achieved his goals mostly behind the scenes, he had a major hand as a young […]
From the Editor – Winter 2006
By: James R. Mathieu
Welcome to expedition’s final issue for 2006! Once again, we offer an eclectic range of articles presenting anthropological and archaeological research from around the world. We begin with two cultural anthropological studies from recent graduates of Penn’s Ph.D. program in Anthropology. The first, set in the South Pacific, discusses the continuing importance of drinking kava […]
The Amarna Exhibit
From the Director
By: Richard M. Leventhal
On November 12, 2006, Penn Museum opened a new exhibit, Amarna, Ancient Egypt’s Place in the Sun. It is an important exhibit for many reasons, all of which exemplify the nature of the Museum’s research and outreach. First, the materials in this exhibit are from our own collections. These have been curated by three of […]
Robert L. Schuyler: Associate Curator-in-Charge, Historical Archaeology Section
Meet the Curators
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
Robert L. Schuyler, Associate Curator-in-Charge of the Museum’s Historical Archaeology Section, remembers a fascination with the past as a 4-year-old living in New Haven, Connecticut. His interest then was paleontology (the study of prehistoric creatures such as dinosaurs), but by the fifth grade, Schuyler’s visits to Yale University’s Peabody Museum and his reading of National Geographic […]
Tutankhamun Treasures: The First Tut Show Came to the Museum
From the Archives
By: Alessandro Pezzati
As the exhibition Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs travels around the United States before opening at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute in February 2007, the story of the first U.S. tour of the world’s most famous archaeological discovery provides a fascinating comparison. In 1961 the planned construction of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt […]
A Consuming Tradition
Kava Drinking in Fiji
By: Matt Tomlinson
Like people in many other times and places, indigenous Fijians are firm believers in a glorious but disappeared past. In the old days, many Fijians say, the ancestors were big and strong, everyone worked together on communal projects, and chiefs had unquestioned authority. In the present, by contrast, people see comparative weakness and disorder. The […]
Priniatikos Pyrgos
A Primary Harbor Settlement and Emporium in Eastern Crete
By: Barbara J. Hayden and Yannis Bassiakos and Thanasis Kalpaxis and Apostolos Sarris and Metaxia Tsipopoulou
Priniatikos Pyrgos, a coastal settlement in eastern Crete, sits upon a limestone promontory in the center of a broad beach. Its location—at the nexus of cross-island routes and near rich coastal valleys with abundant water—makes its protected anchorage an ideal spot for a trading emporium. Discoveries here in the early 20th century indicated that the […]
Ec(k)s Mark the Spot?
Book News & Reviews
By: Greg Borgstede and Benjamin Porter and James R. Mathieu
The Olmecs: America’s First Civilization by Richard A. Diehl (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005) 208 pp., 152 illus, 20 in color, paper $22.50 ISBN 0-500-28503-9 Reviewed by Greg Borgstede, a Research Associate in the Museum’s American Section. The Olmecs of the humid lowland Mexican Gulf Coast were one of the earliest civilizations in Mesoamerica. […]
Serendipity: Secrets of the Mudballs
Research Notes
By: Naomi F. Miller and Kimberly E. Leaman and Julie Unruh
A surprising amount of archaeological discovery consists simply of connecting the disparate bits of information that an average archaeologist holds in her mind. Such a connection occurred recently at the Museum’s research project in Gordion, Turkey, leading us to a new insight into ancient textile production. In June 2006 we began testing a new approach […]
