Volume 38 : Articles

A Case of Circumstantial Evidence

By: Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway

“Never forget that the most valuable acquisition a man of refined taste can make is a piece of fine Greek sculpture.” This quotation, taken from a letter by Gavin Hamilton to Charles Townley, well illustrates the cultural climate in England at the turn of the 19th cen­tury. Hamilton, a Scottish painter, archaeologist, and dealer, may have had […]

By: Michael W. Meister

High above the mighty Indus, on hills com­monly called the Salt Range, stand important remains of forts with citadels and temples (Fig. 1). Built from the 6th to the 11th centuries AD, these structures lie in what was ancient India’s far northwest (Fig. 3), now in the Panjab and North West Frontier provinces of Pakistan. […]

An Annual Renewal Rite in the Eastern Solomon Islands

By: William H. Davenport

Each year on the small island of Santa Catalina (locally called Aorilei) in the eastern Solomon Islands, a religious ceremony called Wogosia is observed sometime in June or July. Wogosia literally means “The Worship” and it is, as tbe name would suggest, tbe biggest religious observance that this community of 350 persons celebrates. I call […]

By: Dorothy K. Washburn

Archaeologists typically classify the objects they excavate into “types,” that is, groupings of arti­facts that appear similar, generally from the point of view of their shape and assumed function. Yet one of the most fascinating and elusive questions about archaeo­logical or ethnographic artifacts is not how they were used or shaped but how their original […]

Photographs of Mongolia

By: Robert McCracken Peck

For at least 10,000 years the people of Mongolia have dealt with minimal rainfall, sparse vegetation, and some of the most difficult climatic conditions in Central Asia by assuming a semi-nomadic existence. Although some collective airiculture was instituted by the country’s communist government in the 1950s, pastoral nomadism is still a way of life for […]

By: Vincent C. Pigott

The University of Pennsylvania Museum ready to take on the next millennium? This question is prompted by a conference I recently attended at the Smithsonian, entitled “Museums for the New Millennium.” In fact, we are under­taking projects that look to the future right now. These are, in one way or another, forms of electronic “outreach,” […]

By: David Whitehouse

Gold-glasses—objects with gold foil ornament sandwiched between two fused layers of glass—were the first category of Roman glass to attract the attention of antiquarians and collectors in the 17th century. The antiquarians were interested primarily because most gold-glasses were discovered in cata­combs, the underground galleries where early Christian and Jewish communities buried their dead. Some […]

By: Lee Horne

In the fall of 1997, more than 180 Roman glass ves­sels from the University of Pennsylvania Museum will be placed on display—most for the first time ever. The exhibition, Roman Glass: Reflections on Cultural Change, is being organized and curated by Stuart Fleming, Scientific Director of MASCA here at the Museum and Guest Editor of […]

By: Jeremy A. Sabloff

It is a great privilege and honor for me to be the eleventh Director (and the second Charles K. Williams II Direc­tor) of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. It is a particular pleasure to succeed Bob Dyson and to be able to acknowledge all that he has accomplisher these past dozen years. In looking over […]

By: Hilary E. M. Cool

In AD 60 the town of Colchester, about 85 kilometers northeast of London (Fig. 2), was burnt to the ground and its inhabitants slaughtered during a native revolt led by the Oceanian queen Boudica. The remains of this early town are now buried 2 to 3 meters below the modern town, and so are not […]