Volume 52 : Articles

From the Archives

By: Alessandro Pezzati

Forty years have passed since Penn Museum Director Froelich Rainey presented the famous Pennsylvania Declaration, giving our Museum the distinction of becoming the first in the world to stop collecting archaeological objects obtained through the looting and plundering of ancient sites. Many other museums have since followed the Penn Museum’s lead, and bad publicity arising […]

From the Director

By: Richard Hodges

Penn Museum has launched a new expedition. Explicitly for undergraduates of the University, it is a summer school based in Montalcino, southern Tuscany. Our research design is very straightforward: we are investigating two sites associated with a 7th century monastery in the picturesque Val d’Asso, a UNESCO World Heritage landscape since 2004. But the archaeology in […]

Excerpt from Astronomical Petroglyphs

By: Marinus Anthony Van Der Sluijs and Anthony L. Peratt

The so-called “Stickman” is the world’s most prevalent petroglyph. Found everywhere, the stickman can be carved as a stick-like figure with a head, two arms stretched out and up, and two legs stretched out and down. The figure is distinguished by a male anatomy. The stickman has several variations: with a belly, “an inner tube” […]

Three Intersecting Lives

By: Robert G. Ousterhout

2010 marks the centennial of the deaths of two notable individuals and the demise of a career for a third. Osman Hamdi Bey is as famous today as an artist and archaeologist as his contemporary, the photographer John Henry Haynes, is obscure. Their colleague, the Assyriologist Hermann Vollrath Hilprecht, remains at best infamous. Their three […]

Searching For Rock Art Evidence for an Ancient Super Aurora

By: Marinus Anthony Van Der Sluijs and Anthony L. Peratt

For tens of thousands of years, humans have expressed themselves artistically on their surroundings—painting, etching, carving, and molding designs, decorations, and imagery on surfaces ranging from portable, often hand-held objects (such as animal bone and stone) to more stationary features of the landscape, such as scattered rocks, caves, and cliffs. The most famous early examples […]

Penn Museum in Laos

By: Elizabeth Hamilton

The Middle Mekong Archaeological Project (MMAP), a pioneering archaeological project led by Penn Museum staff member Dr. Joyce White, wrapped up its ninth year in Laos in the winter of 2009–2010. MMAP is one of the very few Western archaeological projects operating in Laos, whose prehistory is barely beginning to be known. The Luce Foundation has generously […]

Research Notes

By: Gregory L. Possehl

In 2008, I published an article in Expedition on Penn’s first professor of Sanskrit, W. Norman Brown (1892–1975), and his engagement with the archaeology of ancient India. Brown was an institution builder and had founded the School of Indic and Iranian Studies. He wanted to establish an American School of Archaeology in British India, formed along […]

From the Director

By: Richard Hodges

The recent deaths of Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle and William R. Coe have robbed the Museum of two of its most distinguished archaeologists. A portrait of Bill Coe, the legendary excavator of Tikal, follows in these pages. But Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle commands less attention in the United States, unlike in Britain, where her passing was mourned at a […]

The Mt. Lykaion Excavation and Survey Project

By: David Gilman Romano and Mary E. Voyatzis

In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek poet Callimachus wrote a Hymn to Zeus asking the ancient and most powerful Greek god whether he was born in Arcadia on Mt. Lykaion or in Crete on Mt. Ida. My soul is all in doubt, since debated is his birth. O Zeus, some say that you were […]

By: Jane Hickman

The spring 2010 issue of Expedition takes you from Greece to India to Vietnam. Our first feature describes an on-going excavation and survey at Mt. Lykaion, a remote site located in the Peloponnesos region of mainland Greece. In 2007, David Romano and Mary Voyatzis began excavation of the ash altar at Mt. Lykaion. Here, they write about […]