Welcome to Expeditions summer issue! In the following pages you will read about the Museum’s role in the Centennial Potlatch—a celebration last autumn of Tlingit culture in Sitka, Alaska. We will also transport you to the highlands. On Lake Titicaca in the Andes, a Penn-led team of experimental archaeologists built and sailed a reed boat carrying a 9-ton stone to better understand the technological and social capabilities of the builders of South America’s famed site of Tiwanaku. Then we are off to Asia, where the first Western archaeologists permitted to work in Tibet present their findings concerning the pre-Buddhist sites on the world’s highest plateau.
This issue also introduces you to the Associate Curator in the Museum’s Egyptian Section, while saying goodbye to Frederica De Laguna, an Honorary Curator for many years in the American Section. From the Archives you will learn about an impostor who charmed and fooled the Museum’s staff and visitors in the early 20th century, and the Registrar details her recent visit to the excavations in Zhaoling, China—the original home of the Museum’s renowned Chinese horse reliefs.
We also offer two short articles about ongoing research pertaining to the Middle East. The first, using the Museum’s collections from its 1922–34 excavations at Ur in modern-day Iraq, provides new insight into ancient weights and systems of weighing, while the second takes us back to Iran for the first time since 1979, highlighting Museum-sponsored projects, both past and present. As usual, our Museum Mosaic will inform you about many of the Museum’s recent and upcoming events, and we are happy to present book reviews covering the Maya, Egypt, and the Pashtun of Pakistan. As always, we welcome feedback and hope you find this issue and our website (http://www.museum.upenn.edu/expedition) worth sharing with your family and friends.
JAMES R. MATHIEU, PH.D.
Editor