AS ERIC HOBSON NOTES on page 14, when Percy C. Madeira set off on the “Central American Expedition of the University Museum” in 1930, his instinct that the bird’s-eye view offered by airplane travel would revolutionize field archaeology across remote locations was later proven correct; by 1932, airplane travel was established for scientific investigation around the world. One can only imagine what Madeira thought when the U-2 spy plane flown by American pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down by Soviet Air Defense Forces in May 1960. Did he wonder whether spy planes had captured images of ancient sites, along with the military targets they were intended to record? Thanks to painstaking analysis by Emily Hammer and Jason Ur of films from the planes’ flights over Mesopotamia, we now know that they did. Their research is spotlighted in the exhibition U-2 Spy Planes & Aerial Archaeology, which opened at the Penn Museum this summer (see page 11).
The aviation revolution also greatly expanded the public audience for archaeological and heritage sites, with global air travel exceeding four billion passenger trips annually by 2019. The impact of tourism on World Heritage Sites and their surrounding communities is one of the key challenges for conservation considered at an October 2022 conference convened by Lynn Meskell at the Perry World House to mark the 50th anniversary of UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention (see page 4).
In this issue, we also hear from the curators of the Penn Museum’s new Eastern Mediterranean Gallery, opening November 19 (the next issue of Expedition, Vol. 64-3, will be a special issue on the research that informed this gallery); from Chris Green, doctoral student working with the Kanak people of Kanaky/New Caledonia on a heritage-based strategy of self- determination; and from Erhan Tamur, Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and co-curator of the exhibition She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, on view at the Morgan Library & Museum.
AMANDA MITCHELL-BOYASK
PUBLISHER