Author: Deborah I. Olszewski
Middle Egypt in Prehistory
A Search for the Origins of Modern Human Behavior and Human Dispersal
By: Deborah I. Olszewski and Shannon P. McPherron and Harold L. Dibble and Marie Soressi
The word Egypt for many people evokes images of one of the great civilizations of the ancient world and represents one of the major foci of research by the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Tens of thousands of years before Egyptian civilization, however, early humans living along the Nile River and in the deserts of Egypt […]
An Ice Age Oasis in Jordan
Pleistocene Hunter-gatherers in the Wadi al-Hasa Region
By: Deborah I. Olszewski and Nancy R. Coinman
If you visited the Wadi al-Hasa region of west central Jordan today, you would probably find it hard to picture it as an attractive place to make a home. But during the last Ice Age (the Pleistocene epoch), it looked very different. Some 20,000 years ago and earlier, an expansive lake filled the eastern section […]
Donald White
Meet the Curators
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
Some of you know a thing or two about our featured museum curator, Donald White, because of his role in the exhibition, “Worlds Intertwined: Etruscans, Greeks and Romans.” This ambitious project occupied much of his time since 1990, intensifying from 1999 leading up to the opening of the new Etruscan and Roman galleries at the […]
Richard Zettler: Associate Curator-In-Charge, Near East Section
Meet the Curators
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
Ancient Mesopotamia is Richard Zettler’s research passions. As Associate Curator-in-Charge of the Near East Section, and Associate Professor of Anthropologic, his expertise has made him the person to contact about the Near East, especially in light of recent events in Iraq. Some of you will have read his editorial, “Thieves of History,” in the Philadelphia Inquirer, […]
Robert J. Sharer
Meet the Curators
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
Robert J. Sharer, Curator-in-Charge of the Museum’s American Section, became interested in archaeology as an undergraduate when he took a summer job at the Michigan State University Museum. The fascinating stories of Arctic field archaeology told by his boss, the noted Arctic scholar Moreau Maxwell, prompted Sharer to broaden his history major by taking additional […]
Meet the New Director
Richard M. Leventhal, the Williams Director
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
On JULY 1, 2004, a new era at the Penn Museum began when Richard M. Leventhal, noted Mesoamerican scholar, officinally assumed the Charles K. Williams Directorship. Leventhal begins his tenure with a footnote that may well be unique in the world of museum directors. One of his mentors during his student days was Jeremy A. Sabloff, […]
Prehistoric Abydos
Africa's Gateway to the World
By: Harold L. Dibble and Shannon P. McPherron and Deborah I. Olszewski and Jennifer R. Smith and Utsav Schurmans and Laurent Chiotti
Most Expedition readers will be familiar with the Museum’s longstanding Egyptian research project at Abydos, which focuses on Abydos’s ancient yet historically known past, and was most recently presented in a special issue of Expedition in 2006 (vol. 48-2). In contrast, the following research focuses on Abydos’s far more distant and prehistoric past. The origin […]
Nancy S. Steinhardt, Curator of Chinese Art, Asian Section
Meet the Curators
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
Penn museum’s curator of Chinese Art in the Asian Section, Nancy S. Steinhardt, began studying Chinese while attending the Mark Twain Summer Institute in St. Louis when she was 13 years old. This experience opened up new and exciting vistas centered on East Asia, and Steinhardt continued learning Chinese throughout her high school years by […]
Clark L. Erickson
Meet the Curators
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
Growing up surrounded by his mother’s books and framed travel photos of archaeological sites and places such as Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, Clark L. Erickson, Associate Curator in the Museum’s American Section, developed an early interest in the study of the past. Since then, Erickson has dedicated his career to “peopling the past” by understanding the […]
Robert W. Preucel, Associate Curator, American Section
Meet the Curators
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
One of the many hats Robert W. Preucel wears as the Gregory Annenberg Weingarten Associate Curator of North America is Chair of the Museum’s Repatriation Committee. This committee is charged with implementing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAG-PRA) passed by Congress in 1990. You may be familiar with this aspect of Preucel’s work […]
Meet the New Director
Richard Hodges, The Williams Director
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
On October 1, 2007, Penn Museum welcomed its new Williams Director, Dr. Richard Hodges, O.B.E. His archaeological career began in the late 1960s in his home village in Wiltshire, England, where, as a teenager, he attended a lecture by Duncan Grant King—one of the excavators during the 1920s of the famous British prehistoric site of […]
C. Brian Rose: Curator-in-Charge, Mediterranean Section
Meet the Curators
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
The spark that led to a career in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world for C. Brian Rose, Curator-in-Charge of the Museum’s Mediterranean Section, was his participation on excavations in Italy in 1973 as a high school exchange student in the American Field Service program. The following year he became an undergraduate at Haverford College, where […]
Barry L. Eichler: Associate Curator-in-Charge, Babylonian Section
Meet the Curators
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
A fascination with the human condition and the problems that society attempts to solve is the driving force behind the research and teaching of Barry L. Eichler, Associate Curator-in-Charge of the Babylonian Section at Penn Museum. His close readings of ancient texts on Middle Eastern clay tablets provide insights into issues of societal control, law, and […]
Gregory L. Possehl, Curator, Asian Section
Meet the Curators
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
The Summer of 2004 marked 40 years of archaeological research in India and Pakistan for Gregory L. Possehl, Curator in the Asian Section and Professor of Anthropology. His career began at the University of Washington, where as an undergraduate he excavated shell middens and worked as a survey archaeologist for the state’s highways department. What […]
Meet the New Board Chair
Michael J. Kowalski: Chairman of the Museum's Board of Overseers
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
Penn museum welcomed Michael J. Kowalski as Chairman of the Museum Board of Overseers on July 1, 2006. Kowalski graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and has a long- standing interest in modern and ancient cultures. As an undergraduate studying economics at Wharton, his diverse interests included Russian history and literature. His fascination […]
Meet the Curators – Josef Wegner
Associate Curator, Egyptian Section
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
The Museum’s Josef Wegner, Associate Curator in the Egyptian Section, has been interested in Egyptology since childhood. Growing up in New Hampshire, he was long aware of the significant Egyptian collections housed at the Museum and the opportunities for academic training in Egyptology. Wegner thus came to Penn in 1985 as an undergraduate and completed […]
Harold L. Dibble, Curator, European Archaeology Section
Meet the Curators
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
HAROLD L. DIBBLE, Curator-in-Charge of the European Archaeology Section at the Museum, has been fascinated with stone tools and archaeology since he was a small child. He fondly remembers poring over C. W. Ceram’s The March of Archaeology (Knopf, 1958). Some might think his career path as a Paleolithic archaeologist was long since chosen when […]
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 […]
Rebecca Huss-Ashmore, Associate Curator-in-Charge, Physical Anthropology Section
Meet the Curators
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
Rebecca Huss-Ashmore, Associate Curator-inCharge of Penn Museum’s Physical Anthropology Section, has traveled nearly full circle in her career. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, she majored in German, with a minor in American Literature, but also took anthropology classes. These included a course taught by Oscar Lewis, who one day unexpectedly asked her […]
When Stone Is More Than Stone
Clues to Prehistoric Resource Use in Jordan
By: Deborah I. Olszewski and Maysoon al-Nahar
Scattered Across the world on the surface and in buried deposits are billions of prehistoric stone artifacts the most durable evidence of humanity’s past 2.6 million years. Public interest and research on such artifacts often focuses on the forms of arrowheads, handaxes, drills, and other recognizable tools and on how they were made by prehistoric […]
Lauren Ristvet
Meet the Curators
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
Lauren Ristvet, the Robert H. Dyson, Jr. Assistant Curator in the Museum’s Near East Section, became interested in archaeology while growing up in New Mexico. She and her brother, Matthew, explored the Southwestern archaeological landscape while hiking. Ristvet’s early interests led her to pursue an anthropology degree at Yale University from 1996 to 1999. Her […]
Harold Dibble
Scientist and Mentor, 1951-2018
By: Deborah I. Olszewski
Harold L. Dibble, preeminent paleoanthropologist, passed away on June 10, 2018, age 66. He was first and foremost a scientist in his approach to archaeology and a mentor to countless students and colleagues. Harold was the Francis E. Johnston Term Professor in Anthropology and Director of the Laboratory of Ancient Technology at the University of […]
