Expedition Volume 63 No. 2, Summer 2021

SUMMER 2021 | VOL. 63, NO. 2

THE MAGAZINE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

KEEPING THE TLINGIT THOUGHT WORLD ALIVE KALIVO: SETTLEMENT OR REFUGE? • THE STORIES WE WEAR

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Contents

SUMMER 2021 | VOLUME 63, NUMBER 2

04 Surprise and Luck in a Roman Fresco Project

By Charles K. Williams, II

06 An Unforgettable Smile: Remembering Lee Horne

By Richard L. Zettler

08 In His Own Words: George F. Bass and the Birth of Underwater Archaeology

14 DEPARTMENTS 2

From the Publisher

14 Kalivo: The Vaunting Ambition

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From the Williams Director

of King Pyrrhus at Butrint

42

In the Labs

By David Hernandez and Richard Hodges

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Learning Lessons

48

Artifact Perspective

50

Membership Matters

52

Welcome News

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From the Archives

24 Keeping the Tlingit Thought World Alive

By Lucy Fowler Williams and X̱’unei Lance Twitchell

32 The Stories Behind The Stories We Wear

An Interview with Jess Bicknell, Jane Hickman,

Sarah Linn, and Lauren Ristvet

PENN MUSEUM 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6324 Tel: 215.898.4000 | www.penn.museum The Penn Museum respectfully acknowledges that it is situated on Lenapehoking, the ancestral and spiritual homeland of the Unami Lenape.

Hours Tuesday–Sunday: 10:00 am–5:00 pm.

Closed Mondays and major holidays.

ON THE COVER: A new commission in Native American Voices: Bill Wierzbowski, Keeper, American Section, installing the mixed media work Our Language Is Encoded Within Us by X̱’unei Lance Twitchell and Yéil Ya-Tseen Nicholas Galanin.

Guidelines for Visiting The Museum prioritizes a safe and enjoyable experience for all. Learn more about our guidelines for visiting, including booking timed tickets, at www.penn.museum/plan-your-visit.

Admission Penn Museum members: Free; PennCard holders (Penn faculty, staff, and students): Free; Active US military personnel with ID: Free; K-12 teachers with school ID: Free Adults: $18.00; Seniors $16.00; Children (6-17) and students with ID: $13.00; Children 5 and under: Free.

Museum Library Call 215.898.4021 for information.

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FROM THE PUBLISHER

A Snapshot in Time

O

ur cover image offers a glimpse behind the scenes this past spring, as Bill Wierzbowski, Keeper, American Section, worked with Head of Preparations Ben Neiditz (not pictured) to

install a new commission in Native American Voices by X̱’unei Lance Twitchell and Yéil Ya-Tseen exploring language loss and current efforts in the Tlingit language community (page 24). It also documents the COVID-19 era at the Penn Museum, where, since July 2020 when City of Philadelphia guidelines eased, staff from many areas across the Museum worked onsite observing stringent safety guidelines to install new exhibitions and displays, steward and preserve the collections, and continue to serve faculty, students, and visitors. Learning Lessons: Engaging Our University Community (page 44) is another COVID-19 snapshot introducing the undergraduate curatorial interns who pivoted the Student Exhibition Program to create a series of virtual programs tied to the Provost’s Year of Jazz.

As our operations return to normal this summer, we acknowledge and thank our staff for their dedication and flexibility, our students and faculty for their continued engagement, and our visitors, members, and donors for their loyal patronage and support throughout the pandemic.

We also look forward to the special exhibition The Stories We Wear, opening on September 25. Expedition’s Guest Editor Alisha Adams interviewed Head of Exhibitions Jess Bicknell and Curators Lauren Ristvet, Jane Hickman, and Sarah Linn on the exhibition’s goals and development, and the remarkable objects that speak to how what we wear tells our story.

This issue also offers armchair travels to the picturesque, fortified hilltop site of Kalivo in southwestern Albania, courtesy of David Hernandez and Richard Hodges, and to ancient Corinth, where a team of Italian conservators is working on an extraordinary restoration of frescoes from fragments excavated by Charles Williams in the 1980s. And we remember Lee Horne, archaeologist and editor of this magazine from 1990 to 1996, and, through his own words, George F. Bass, founding father of underwater archaeology.

PUBLISHER

Amanda Mitchell-Boyask GUEST EDITOR

Alisha Adams

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Ursa Anderson, 2021 Summer Intern ARCHIVES AND IMAGE EDITOR

Alessandro Pezzati GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Remy Perez

COPY EDITOR

Page Selinsky, Ph.D.

ACADEMIC ADVISORY BOARD

Marie-Claude Boileau, Ph.D. Richard Leventhal, Ph.D. Simon Martin, Ph.D. Janet Monge, Ph.D. Kathleen Morrison, Ph.D. Lauren Ristvet, Ph.D. C. Brian Rose, Ph.D. Page Selinsky, Ph.D. Stephen J. Tinney, Ph.D. Jennifer Houser Wegner, Ph.D. Lucy Fowler Williams, Ph.D. CONTRIBUTORS

Jessica Bicknell Marie-Claude Boileau, Ph.D. Kris Forrest Christina Jones Ellen Owens Tena Thomason Jo Tiongson-Perez Alessandro Pezzati Anne Tiballi Julianna Whalen PHOTOGRAPHY

Francine Sarin Jennifer Chiappardi Remy Perez Julianna Whalen (unless noted otherwise) INSTITUTIONAL OUTREACH MANAGER

Darragh Nolan

AMANDA MITCHELL-BOYASK PUBLISHER

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© The Penn Museum, 2021 Expedition® (ISSN 0014-4738) is published three times a year by the Penn Museum. Editorial inquiries should be addressed to expedition@pennmuseum.org.

Inquiries regarding delivery of Expedition should be directed to membership@pennmuseum.org.

Unless otherwise noted, all images are courtesy of the Penn Museum.

FROM THE WILLIAMS DIRECTOR

Community Partnerships Dear Friends, By the time you read these thoughts, my family and I will have officially taken up residence in Philadelphia, where my younger son will start high school; we look forward to settling into a new home in such a vibrant city. For myself, I can’t wait to meet regularly in person with Museum and Penn colleagues and students, our Museum Board and Council members, docents, other volunteers, and you— our Museum members.

One such opportunity will be at member preview events ahead of the opening on September 25 of our largest new display since fall 2019: the special exhibition The Stories We Wear. In the last issue of Expedition, I shared my excitement at coming to a museum with global collections, and this beautifully designed show will display extraordinary pieces from every curatorial section. Importantly, this exhibition also spotlights—through the loan of one of each of their ensembles—legendary Philadelphians including Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco, drag artist Eric Jaffe, Nigerian-American former Philadelphia Union soccer player Amobi Okugo, former Philadelphia Eagles outside linebacker Connor Barwin, and Metropolitan Opera contralto and civil rights icon Marian Anderson. The collaborations that made each of these loans possible herald the community conversations and engagement that will be at the center of strategic planning this fall and all our work going forward.

Community consultation and partnership in repatriation work is at the heart of the report of an internal committee assembled in August 2020 to examine issues pertaining to, and make recommendations for, the appropriate treatment of portions of the Morton Cranial Collection. In one of my first actions as Williams Director, I wholeheartedly endorsed the recommendations of the Committee’s April 2021 report.

I am pleased to share that ten civic and spiritual leaders in West Philadelphia have since agreed to serve on our Morton Cranial Collection Community Advisory Group; we look to their collective guidance in the respectful and swift reburial of the remains of Black Philadelphians in the Morton Collection.

This is only a beginning. Revelations later in April around human remains recovered from the MOVE site in West Philadelphia in 1985 and housed at our Museum made clear the urgency with which we must assess our practices

Williams Director Christopher Woods with the Bull-headed Lyre in the Middle East Galleries, PM B17694B.

of collecting, storing, displaying, and researching human remains. At the same time, we have to take swift action to create an infrastructure to handle repatriation of collections that do not fall under NAGPRA with community consultation at every step.

So, with support from the Office of the Provost and members of our Board, we have initiated searches for collections staff to complete a comprehensive inventory, with provenance research, of human remains across all curatorial sections and, with the Department of Anthropology, the search for a faculty-curator in bioanthropology/bioarchaeology to lead our repatriation work.

I will continue to report to you transparently in these pages and elsewhere as we advance this work, and I am deeply grateful for your membership support, which impacts every aspect of our mission.

Warm regards,

CHRISTOPHER WOODS, PH.D. WILLIAMS DIRECTOR Summer 2021

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Surprise and Luck in a Roman Fresco Project

BY CHARLES K. WILLIAMS, II

A painted frieze of putti racing horses on the colonnade around the top of the theater at Corinth, showing a close similarity with a similar frieze from a house in Pompeii.

ARCHAEOLOGY always has a certain element of surprise and luck connected to it, for it is unpredictable to divine what lies directly under the surface upon which one is standing. So it was in the 1980s east of the Roman theater in Corinth. The American School of Classical Studies at Athens decided to investigate the unexplored fields lying east of the theater, if for no other reason than to make the area more attractive to tourists interested in visiting the site.

As was expected, beneath a heavy cover of weeds, rocks, and earthquake debris that had accumulated over the centuries, standing walls started to reveal 4

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themselves. Careful excavation of fallen plaster lying on the floor of the rooms and a few clinging bits on the walls started to define themselves as decoration similar to frescoes known from Pompeii and other Roman sites along the Bay of Naples—an indication that suggested the fresco debris definitely needed to be investigated.

The obvious next move to be made was to find a skilled team of Italian conservators who were familiar with the materials and techniques involved in the project. A team of about 16 professionals from Rome’s Centro di Conservazione Archeologica, led by Roberto Nardi, is now working on the Corinthian frescoes.

above: Epistyle decoration belonging to Corinthian columns. left: Corinthian column capitals. below: Eros from south wall of Unit 3.

The group has been contracted for a six-year period to complete the work. It is hoped that the numerous Corinthian column capitals now being restored will find their correct positions in supporting the egg and dart epistyle as originally designed. Other daunting feats also lie before the team, such as restoring figures that are missing whole areas of body and dress.

One unsuspected reason for the Roman Fresco Project’s complexity is the fact that the wall frescoes recovered in the excavations of the 1980s appear to be

composed of more wall decoration than walls upon which to put them. It is such problems that, when they come to light, make a sometimes tedious job really fascinating.

Charles K. Williams, II, Field Director of the Roman Fresco Project, was Director of the Corinth Excavations from 1966 to 1977, where he continues as Director Emeritus.

Dr. Williams is also a Consulting Scholar in the Penn Museum’s Mediterranean Section.

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An Unforgettable Smile REMEMBERING LEE HORNE, GR88

BY RICHARD L. ZETTLER

LEE HORNE, Editor of Expedition 1990–1996, whose infectious smile and ready sense of humor lit up the Penn Museum for more than five decades, died peacefully at home on April 10, 2021.

LEE CLAFLIN (ELLIS) HORNE was born October 7, 1936 in Jersey City, NJ. She was the elder of the two children of Charles Clifton and Elsie Sarah (Povey) Ellis. Growing up in northern New Jersey, she attended Summit High School.

Lee was artistic and interested in science and mathematics, as noted in her senior yearbook, and earned an academic scholarship to Bryn Mawr College. She graduated in 1958, having majored in mathematics. Lee married Smith Hamill Horne, Jr., son of a prominent Philadelphia physician, shortly after graduating. The couple, who settled in Gladwyne, reopened Camp Choconut, a summer boys’ camp near Friendsville in northeastern Pennsylvania, in 1961. Hamill had attended the camp as a child and subsequently served as a counselor there. He and Lee adopted a son, Joseph Sommerville Horne.

Lee in her official Penn Museum PR photo in 1989.

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Lee Horne on the Mahidasht Project in Iran in 1975. Photo by Lou Levine.

Shortly after her marriage to Hamill Horne, Lee began volunteering as a docent at the Penn Museum.

She became one of the original eight Volunteer Guides, organized by the Women’s Committee, in 1962 and served as Chair of the Volunteer Guides for several years. She and Hamill divorced in 1974.

In time, Lee’s years as a Volunteer Guide led her to pursue a post-graduate degree in archaeology. After participating in the Royal Ontario Museum’s excavations at Seh Gabi in the Kangavar Valley (Kermanshah Province) in western Iran, doubtless lured by her life-long friend Carol Kramer, who served as Assistant Director to Louis D. Levine, Lee began coursework in the Ph.D. program in the Department of Anthropology at Penn in fall 1973. She joined the Royal Ontario Museum’s work in the Mahidasht valley in western Iran in 1975 before launching her Ph.D. dissertation research as an integral part of Brian Spooner’s investigation of the semi-arid Tauran region of northeastern Iran. Conducted under the aegis of the Iranian Department of the Environment, with support from UNESCO, her field work in the years leading up to the Iranian Revolution culminated in her Ph.D. dissertation entitled The Spatial Organization of Rural Settlement in Khar O Tauran, Iran: An Ethnoarchaeological Case Study, submitted in 1988. The dissertation built on the ethnoarchaeological work of Patty Jo Watson and Carol Kramer at villages in the Iranian Zagros Mountains. It contained a wealth of baseline data on settlement location, village morphology, household size and composition, and so on. Lee’s primary objective was to build up datasets that would help archaeologists in the interpretation of excavated remains, more closely connecting them to past behavior.

Lee spun a half dozen articles off her research and published a revised version of the dissertation as Village Spaces: Settlement and Society in Northeastern Iran, under the imprint of the Smithsonian Institution Press, in 1994.

Lee was an extraordinarily gifted writer and one reviewer commented that the book was “written in a refreshingly accessible style.”

In the later 1980s as a Research Associate in the Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology (MASCA), Lee refocused her ethnoarchaeological interest on metallurgy, studying traditional brass casting in West Bengal, India, with the American Institute of Indian Studies providing support for her fieldwork.

Lee became academic editor of Expedition in 1990.

Her years as editor were heady times for the magazine.

She oversaw the publication of 17 single or double special issues, most in full color, on a range of themes. One of the first volumes explored her own research interest, ethnoarchaeology, and she contributed an article entitled “Reading Village Spaces.” Several of the issues of Expedition she oversaw accompanied exhibitions. Lee was particularly hands-on with one of her last issues devoted to Roman glass. The issue appeared with the exhibition Roman Glass: Reflections on Cultural Change, curated by Stuart Fleming, MASCA’s Scientific Director, that opened in Philadelphia and traveled to various other venues. Jeremy Sabloff praised the “great strides” Expedition had taken under Lee Horne’s editorship when he became Penn Museum’s Williams Director in 1994.

Lee married Bruce Pearson in 1993 and the extended family they created revolved around their home at 25th and Panama Street in Center City Philadelphia. She retired in 1997 to pursue her artistic interests, returning to painting, which she saw as integral to her identity. Her retirement also gave Lee and Bruce time to travel and encounter new cultures. Yet Lee was frequently lured back to the Penn Museum. She played a critical role in the traveling exhibition Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur that opened in southern California in October 1998 and appeared at more than 13 venues over nearly a decade. She wrote the labels and text panels for the exhibition, planned a special issue of Expedition around it, and edited the catalog—one of the Penn Museum’s top selling publications. It is cited more frequently than Sir Leonard Woolley’s reports on his excavations. Some years later Lee edited the catalog for the

Lee (second from right) at Tell es-Sweyhat in Syria in 1989 with author Richard Zettler (left), Christine M. Hide (right), and the project’s 1956 Chevy dig car. Photo courtesy of Richard Zettler.

Museum’s Roman and Etruscan exhibition, organized by Donald White.

Lee Horne’s last academic undertaking brought her friendship with Carol Kramer, who died in 2002, full circle.

The Wenner-Gren Foundation awarded her a grant in 2006 to prepare Kramer’s personal research materials for archival deposit with the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. She also co-edited a volume to honor Carol Kramer’s memory with Miriam T. Stark and Brenda J. Bowser. The University of Arizona Press published the volume under the title Cultural Transmission and Material Culture: Breaking Down Boundaries in 2008.

No short note can adequately capture Lee Horne as a person or gauge her many contributions to the Penn Museum over decades of her involvement as a Volunteer Guide, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology, a Research Associate, and Editor of Expedition and other Penn Museum publications. I was fortunate to have known and worked with her throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. Though we had lost touch in the years since she retired, the warmest and deepest memories have come flooding back in writing this short note.

All of us who knew her will miss her and we will never forget her smile!

Richard L. Zettler, Ph.D., is Associate Curator-in-Charge, Near East Section.

A celebration of Lee’s life will be held at the Penn Museum on Saturday, October 23. Please email amandamb@upenn.edu for details.

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© INA/Peter Throckmorton

In His Own Words GEORGE F. BASS AND THE BIRTH OF UNDERWATER ARCHAEOLOGY GEORGE FLETCHER BASS, the pioneering archaeologist who was the first to dive on an underwater site rather than directing divers while remaining on dry land, passed away near his home in Texas on March 2, 2021.

DR. BASS first came to Penn in 1959 to pursue a doctoral degree in classical archaeology studying under the legendary Rodney Young, then Curator of the Mediterranean Section. Just a year later, he was diving off Cape Gelidonya on the Turkish coast to excavate a Late Bronze Age shipwreck reported by journalist Peter Throckmorton, after a mere six diving lessons at the Philadelphia YMCA and an hour’s experience with a tank on his back in a 10-feet-deep pool.

Setting a precedent of publishing preliminary articles within a year of each field season—more promptly than many archaeologists—Dr. Bass published an account of that first season in Expedition in 1961.

His extraordinary progress over the next seven years continued to unfold in the magazine. “The Museum Assembles a Fleet,” published in 1965 with Lloyd Wells, chronicles the development and launch of the two-man submarine Asherah. “The Turkish Aegean: Proving Ground for Underwater Archaeology,” published in 1967 with beautiful drawings by Susan Womer Katzev, is a fascinating overview of the equipment developed by his team and used in 1965 and 1967. Beyond the Asherah, these ingenious devices included a plexiglass hemisphere “telephone booth,” which allowed up to four divers to stand inside, dry from their chest up, to discuss excavation problems while standing on the 8

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seabed less than five feet from the site, and an “amphora carrier”—a wooden basket large enough to hold over twenty amphoras at a time, topped by a balloon that would carry it to the surface at once when filled with an air hose. “Problems of Deep Wreck Identification,” published in 1968 with Laurence T. Joline, chronicled a recent summer season attempting to identify ancient

Collecting artifacts from a Bronze Age shipwreck off Cape Gelidonya, Turkey, 1960, PM image 140754.

shipwrecks near Bodrum and Marmaris using a closedcircuit television camera transmitting to a monitor screen in the hold of the sponge boat where the team, watching and taking notes, could take pictures in the split seconds that points of interest on the wreck came into focus.

Dr. Bass’s association with Penn and its University Museum spanned 15 years, from his student assistantship through his tenure as associate professor.

Following his unprecedented work on the Bronze Age ship at Cape Gelidonya, he excavated a 7th century Byzantine trading ship near the Turkish island of Yassi Ada from 1961 to 1964, and a nearby Roman shipwreck from 1967 to 1969. He gave his students not only training in excavation methods, but also a thorough grounding in the history of seafaring, from depictions of ships and boats to written records, and from Old Kingdom Egypt to the Byzantine Empire. He also gave them a shared role in the creation of well-written and handsomely illustrated final publications, inviting them to address a single chapter or a particular group of artifacts found on a site.

His imagination was captivated by the enormity of cultural information on ocean floors. His student and later Executive Director of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) Cynthia Jones Eiseman recalls in a 2014 special issue of Expedition on Undersea Discovery that he would generally start lectures with the observation, “Long before mankind made pottery, domesticated animals, or grew crops, he knew how to make seafaring vessels and to cross open water,” going on to note that trade in obsidian proved that Mediterranean peoples had known how to cross the sea for 10,000 years, and observing that if just one ship or boat had sunk in each of those years, there would be 10,000 vessels to excavate underwater.

After developing techniques that would make excavation underwater not only possible, but also safe and as accurate as on land, he set out to create an environment where established scholars and young graduate students across a broad cross-section of cultural interests could be matched with submerged sites important to their spheres of study.

The INA was borne of his vision in 1972, and in 1976, INA affiliated with Texas A&M University and

established a graduate Nautical Archaeology Program (NAP) as an independent academic unit. He served as INA’s President for its first decade, overseeing excavations across four continents. His most well-known excavation is his oldest submerged shipwreck, which dramatically changed understanding of the histories of literacy, art, music, metallurgy, trade, and cultural exchange across the ancient world. The ship lay off the southern Turkish peninsula of Uluburun and could be dated to the Late Bronze Age, within a few years of 1300 BCE. Its opulent cargo included the only golden scarab bearing Queen Nefertiti’s name ever found, a wooden

George F. Bass and Ann Bass at Cape Gelidonya, Turkey, 1960. © Institute of Nautical Archaeology/Peter Throckmorton.

writing tablet believed to be the oldest ever discovered, and hippopotamus ivory; it was most likely a royal vessel.

The legacy of Dr. Bass is breathtaking: pioneering techniques opening the realm of archaeology beneath the sea, training generations of underwater archaeologists, supervising an array of projects across five continents, sharing his research with both scholars and lay readers in more than 100 publications, and, in his later years, pressing for legislation to preserve submerged cultural resources in U.S. waters.

Numerous awards have honored his achievements, beginning with the Gold Trident for Science, awarded by the International Congress of Subaquatic Activities in Italy in 1964, and including, to name just a few, the Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement from the Archaeological Institute of America in 1986, the Centennial Award of the National Geographic

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GEORGE F. BASS AND THE BIRTH OF UNDERWATER ARCHAEOLOGY

Society in 1988, and a national Medal of Science in 2002 presented by President George W. Bush. The Penn Museum bestowed on him the Lucy Wharton Drexel Medal, its highest award for archaeological achievement, in 2010, when he also gave a spellbinding lecture, “The Million-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle,” on the INA’s 1977–1979 excavation of an 11th century shipwreck carrying a cargo of three tons of broken glass meant to be recycled, which conservators had worked year-round for two decades to piece back together. During that 2010 visit—his last to the Penn Museum—Dr. Bass generously shared his recollections in several hours of interview with C. Brian Rose, Ferry Curator-in-Charge, Mediterranean Section, and then-Williams Director Richard Hodges.

The last article Dr. Bass wrote for Expedition appeared in 2007, looking back at almost 50 years of nautical archaeology. In the pages that follow, excerpts from this and his earlier Expedition articles, as well as from his 2010 Penn Museum interviews with Drs. Hodges and Rose, offer a sense of his breathtaking vision and a glimpse of the extraordinary nature of his achievements in his own words.

TAKING THE BULL BY THE HORNS “ALMOST FROM THE DAY I arrived [at Penn in 1959], I’d just come straight out of the army, running a little 30-man platoon in the middle of a rice paddy very isolated in peacetime Korea, so I was totally responsible for the health, the happiness, the welfare of 30 guys, so had that experience which, thank goodness, that was better than university for what I ended up doing. Rodney Young said how would I like to excavate in Libya? I said, ‘I don’t know any Arabic.’ He said, ‘You can learn.’ I said, ‘I don’t know how to survey.’ ‘You can learn.’ You know, I was just scared. And that was when he said to me, and this is the opening line of my book, ‘If you don’t grab the bull by the horns, you’ll never get anywhere.’”

If you don’t grab the bull by the horns, you’ll never get anywhere.

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Penn Museum Director Richard Hodges awards the Lucy Wharton Drexel Medal for archaeological achievement to George F. Bass, 2010.

The Penn Museum community joins archaeologists and countless others around the world in expressing gratitude to Dr. Bass for opening our eyes to the immeasurable wealth of our human story that lies beneath the sea.

ON CAPE GELIDONYA AND LEARNING TO DIVE “[RODNEY YOUNG] asked if I would be willing to learn how to dive, to be the archaeologist, if Penn would organize or sponsor the expedition to go out with Peter Throckmorton and me to excavate this site. I said ‘Sure, why not?’ So I signed up for a 10-week diving course with the Philadelphia Depth Chargers at the central YMCA and, just to finish that, at the end of the sixth lesson, I had not yet had a tank on and so I said, ‘Dave, can I try a tank on just once please? I leave for Turkey tomorrow and the wreck’s a hundred feet deep.’ And so that evening, I not only put a tank on for the first time, I passed all the tests in the pool, which [included a test in which] he dropped the tank and the fins and the mask all underwater in the deep end and I put them all on holding my breath. The one thing I could do as a child in the pool—I was very unathletic—was hold my breath a long time.”

Interview with Brian Rose in the Penn Museum Archives, 2010

An archaeologist in scuba gear uses a grid to measure the location of finds on the sea floor. Turkey, 1960s, PM image 174889.

REWRITING HISTORY WITH UNIQUE DISCOVERIES FROM BENEATH THE WAVES “IN 1960, we were the first to conduct the complete excavation of an ancient shipwreck on the seabed, a Bronze Age wreck just off Cape Gelidonya on Turkey’s southern coast. Our goal during this period was the complete excavation of shipwrecks and the recovery of their cargoes. With such unique discoveries from beneath the waves we hoped to rewrite history, or at least gain a better understanding of ancient seafaring, ships, trade goods, and long-distance exchange networks.

“What could have been more important than watercraft to people in the past? Didn’t ancient ships and boats deserve the same detailed study as pottery, sculpture, architecture, and coinage? And weren’t ancient shipwrecks virtual time capsules of material culture, much like the eye-opening discoveries sealed in ancient tombs or found covered by sudden catastrophic events such as the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii in Italy? Where else might we expect to find such detailed evidence about the everyday context of trade and exchange?”

“Nautical Archaeology: From Its Beginnings at Penn to Today’s INA” Expedition 49-2, pp.36-44, 2007

ON THE LAUNCH OF THE ASHERAH

“DURING THE COMING YEARS, our knowledge of man’s past will come increasingly from the sea, for underwater archaeology is more than salvaging ancient wine jars and studying the history of ship construction.

Almost any object created by man was carried, at one time or another, by ship, and it is with such objects that archaeologists recreate history. Wrecks full of architectural fragments have been found, and wrecks filled with prehistoric utensils and weapons. Further, most of the major Greek bronze statues we have preserved in our museums today were pulled from beneath the sea.

“But these were all chance finds, located by sponge divers, sport divers, and fishermen’s nets. Once the wrecks had been found, their mapping and excavation took many slow and laborious years.

“We from the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, in four years of underwater excavation, realized the limitations of time and depth placed on divers.

We realized that George F. Bass stands inside the Asherah, the Penn Museum’s underwater archaeology new techniques submarine, before it is hoisted into the must be found, and Warden Garden, 1967. last year greatly speeded the course of our excavation by mapping in three dimensions with stereophotography. This showed so much promise that we could only imagine what might be accomplished if we had the means of going deeper and staying down longer.

“With this submarine, soon to be christened Asherah after a sea goddess of the Phoenicians, the famed sea travelers, we will have those means.”

Remarks at the May 28, 1964, christening of the Asherah, in Groton, CT

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GEORGE F. BASS AND THE BIRTH OF UNDERWATER ARCHAEOLOGY

It would have taken a dozen archaeologists with Aqualungs, using the best mapping methods previously devised, many weeks of diving to do the same job.

THE IMPACT OF THE ASHERAH

“THE MANEUVERABILITY of the Asherah is so delicate that it will be possible to remove cargoes of amphoras with a simple hook below the submarine, and almost certainly it will also be possible to control a suction hose with a very simple, externally mounted mechanical arm. Such techniques, not attempted during this first, experimental season with a submarine, will allow excavation to continue around the clock on wrecks lying hundreds of feet deep.

“Before a site may be excavated, however, it must be thoroughly mapped, and mapping is the most timeconsuming phase of an underwater excavation. It was in this area that we expected, and received, the most from the Asherah. A pair of aerial survey cameras, encased in watertight housings, were mounted six feet apart on the front of the submarine. Specially ground lenses corrected the distortion normally caused by the index of refraction The Asherah, on public display above the pond in the Warden Garden, 1967, PM image 234222.

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of water. Electric leads into the Asherah’s pressure hull allowed the co-pilot to snap off pairs of stereophotographs at will; the cameras automatically advanced the film after each shot and re-cocked their shutters.

“During one dive, the Asherah was ‘flown’ in two passes over a Late Roman wreck lying in 140 feet of water. The co-pilot took a series of overlapping pairs of photographs on each pass, completely covering the site. Before an accurate plan with elevations could be made from these pictures, 56 hours of laboratory work with the instruments of Holland’s International Training Centre for Aerial Survey were needed. But the underwater work had taken less than half an hour!

It would have taken a dozen archaeologists with Aqualungs, using the best mapping methods previously devised, many weeks of diving to do the same job.”

“The Museum Assembles a Fleet” Expedition 7-2, pp. 19-30, 1965.

ACCELERATING DISCOVERY Writing in Expedition in 1967 (“The Turkish Aegean: Proving Ground for Underwater Archaeology”) with drawings by Susan Womer Katzev, Dr. Bass outlined the advantages of the Asherah and other equipment designed to accelerate the pace of mapping, clearing, and lifting artifacts from underwater sites, including the following two examples designed by members of the Penn team.

TELEPHONE BOOTH “The Museum’s underwater telephone booth is a plexiglass hemisphere, four feet in diameter, with a steel collar around its lower edge to increase volume. Fresh air flows into it from a compressor on the barge anchored above. Angle-iron legs, bolted to 1,500 pounds of ballast, keep the air-filled dome from rising off the seabed.

“The booth was placed less than five feet from the Roman wreck in 1967. Up to four divers could stand inside, dry from their chests up, and discuss excavation problems while looking out over the site. They could also telephone the barge, or talk to colleagues on Yassi Ada, working on plans of the wreck, with a radio-telephone combination.

Safety was increased greatly by the phone booth. Every diver knew that if he ran out of air, or became sick or exhausted, he did not have to make it to the surface, 140 feet above, but could swim a few feet to the booth for fresh air or an emergency set of equipment kept there.

The telephone booth was conceived by Michael and Susan Katzev of the Museum’s underwater section, and was built by Farquhar Transparent Globes of Philadelphia.”

AMPHORA CARRIER “Most ancient ships found in the Mediterranean carried cargoes of wine, oil, and other commodities in twohandled storage jars known as amphoras. In almost all cases, the original contents disappeared centuries ago,

Left, the Museum’s underwater telephone booth, developed for the excavation of a Roman shipwreck off the coast of Yassi Ada, Turkey, PM image 380005. Right, Amphora carrier, developed for the excavation of a Roman shipwreck off the coast of Yassi Ada, Turkey, PM image 380006.

Drawings by Susan Womer Katzev, 1968.

but hundreds of heavy amphoras, now filled with mud and sand, must be removed from each wreck during excavation. Efforts to raise them individually, by filling them with air so that they float upward, or by hauling them up with ropes, have proved tedious and time-consuming.

“In 1967 we constructed a wooden basket large enough to hold over twenty amphoras at a time.

Whenever it was full, we used an air hose to fill a balloon attached to its top. The balloon could lift half a ton of cargo to the surface at once, where a dinghy towed it into shallow water for the leisurely removal of the basket’s contents by snorkelers. This has proved to be a simpler and cheaper method of raising cargo than by winch.”

ON HIS SUCCESS “THE SECRET TO MY SUCCESS—I’ve told this to students always—is find people who are better than you are.

Find somebody who can draw better than you can, who can take better photographs than you can, who can translate Greek better than you can, and just put them all together.”

Interview with Brian Rose in the Penn Museum Archives, 2010

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above: Kalivo, southern side. right: Epirus in the Mediterranean.

Drawing by Andrew Crowson.

Kalivo: The Vaunting Ambition of King Pyrrhus at Butrint

By David Hernandez and Richard Hodges

T

HE MAJESTIC, fortified hilltop site of Kalivo is always overshadowed by Butrint (ancient Buthrotum), a neighboring UNESCO

World Heritage Site in southwestern Albania.

Over the years, this fortress has attracted and puzzled antiquarians and scholars alike, as well as the first archaeologists engaged with Butrint.

These included Luigi Maria Ugolini, director of the interwar Italian Archaeological Mission, Dhimosten Budina, a Soviet-trained Albanian archaeologist in the 1970s, and in recent times, the British-based Butrint Foundation. Now, thanks to a combination of archival research alongside new archaeological investigations at Butrint and in the surrounding Pavllas River Valley—recently published in Butrint 7: Beyond Butrint (Oxbow Books, 2020)—its signal historic significance is becoming much clearer.

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Kalivo and Lake Butrint, looking northwards.

K

alivo is a commanding hill. Within its immense viewshed lies the Pavllas River Valley and Lake Butrint. Environmental studies of the lake suggest that before the end of the Hellenistic period, it was an isthmus with water surrounding three sides and a stretch of water on its northern flank. Given its proximity to Butrint, the first professional archaeologist to study the hill, Luigi Maria Ugolini, regarded Kalivo as a “second acropolis,” or an appendage to Butrint. As a prehistorian devoted to Classical scholarship, he mined ancient literary sources for topographical information. This left him at an impasse. He felt confident that Vergil’s third book of the Aeneid correctly described Butrint as “parva Troia” (little Troy). However, he could not reconcile this account with the nearly contemporary writings of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who noted: “The presence of the Trojans at Buthrotum is proved by a hill called Troy, where they encamped at that time [when the city was founded].”

The young Ugolini pondered whether it was Butrint or the enigmatic Kalivo that was called Troy in Epirus (the northwestern area of ancient Greece). Its name is

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Regional map of Butrint and Kalivo.

KALIVO: THE VAUNTING AMBITION OF KING PYRRHUS AT BUTRINT

believed to derive from the Vlach word kaliva, meaning shepherd’s hut and campsite. Transhumant Vlach pastoralists, who occupied the hilltop in winter months during their seasonal migration from mountain villages, may have given Kalivo its modern name.

Large numbers of prehistoric sherds at Kalivo indicate a settlement of some substance in the Late Bronze Age (LBA), around the 13th century BCE. However, British archaeologist Nicholas Hammond long ago reported that necklace beads were recovered from Kalivo dating to the 6th century BCE, pointing to another possible date. Much more intriguing is the precise date of its Cyclopean and polygonal walls with their well-made, if narrow, gates. Our recent survey shows at least two principal phases of fortifications.

The earliest masonry comprises a series of regularly spaced large boulders with smaller stones in between.

In its simplicity, the early wall resembles the LBA right, top: Italian archaeologist Luigi Morricone on the Kalivo fortifications in 1929. Photo by Luigi Maria Ugolini. right, bottom: Luigi Maria Ugolini in the excavated theatre at Butrint, 1930. Photo by Luigi Maria Ugolini.

TROY AND “LITTLE TROY” Troy was an ancient maritime city in Anatolia

sacred origins of Buthrotum (Butrint), which was

(modern Turkey). According to legend, the famed city

said to have been founded by Helenus, Aeneas’s

was attacked and ultimately destroyed by a coalition

Trojan kinsman who also escaped Troy. In the

of Greek states after a ten-year war at the end of the

story, after encountering the bereaved widow

Late Bronze Age (ca. 1200 BCE). The Illiad and the

Andramache at Hector’s empty tomb at Buthrotum,

Odyssey, epic poems ascribed to Homer and sung

Aeneas proclaims that the city was built as a “parva

in Iron Age Greece for centuries, extol the virtues of

Troia” (little Troy), complete with a copy of Pergama,

legendary heroes of Troy, such as Achilles, Odysseus,

Troy’s citadel, its famous gate, Scaea, and the rivers

Hector, Agamemnon, and Ajax. The Romans traced

Simois and Xanthus. The purported ancestral and

their own ancestry to Aeneas, the purported son

spiritual links between Troy, Rome, and Buthrotum,

of the goddess Venus and the Trojan prince, who

mentioned by the contemporary writers Ovid

landed on the shores of Italy as a refugee after

and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, underpinned

escaping the sack of Troy. Writing in the time of

the ideology of the city’s colonization in the

Augustus, Vergil’s Aeneid (3.289–505) refers to the

age of Augustus.

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top: Kalivo plan and excavation trenches. Drawing by Sarah Leppard. bottom left: Kalivo South Gate excavation team, 2004. bottom right: Excavations of the South Gate in 2004.

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KALIVO: THE VAUNTING AMBITION OF KING PYRRHUS AT BUTRINT

and Elea resembling the architecture discovered during our excavations of the South Gate at Kalivo. The similarities are too striking to ignore. Suha proposes these Thesprotian fortresses date to the expansionist period of King Pyrrhus in the earlier 3rd century BCE.

Kalivo, showing southern fortification wall.

enclosures found at smaller nearby sites. Later, this wall was replaced with one of polygonal masonry that featured three narrow gates. These well-crafted walls seem to be the strongest clue to the period of settlement.

Recent regional surveys and studies of wall typology suggest a date in the Classical period (5th century BCE) for its original construction (first phase). This is broadly contemporary with the earliest known fortification circuit enclosing the acropolis of Butrint, erected in the earlier part of that century.

The walls and gates of the second and more substantial phase appear to belong to the Hellenistic period (323–31 BCE), when the hill lay within the tribal kingdom of Chaonia. Several forts with walls and gates strongly resembling Kalivo were discovered by archaeological surveys in the neighboring region of Thesprotia in northwestern Greece. In his study of two Thesprotian fortresses, Mikko Suha found a similar gateway design involving thresholds at Ayios Donatos

THE MYSTERY OF KALIVO’S SIZE AND GRANDEUR With kinship ties to Alexander the Great, King Pyrrhus of Epirus (319–272 BCE) governed one of the most powerful kingdoms in the Mediterranean, famously coming to the defense of the Greek cities of southern Italy against Rome. After consolidating all the Epirote tribal groups, he expanded the dominion of Epirus to its greatest territorial extent with the incorporation of southern Illyria and Akarnania. Pyrrhus founded cities, such as Antigonea and Berenice, constructed immense fortifications throughout Epirus, and built numerous urban monuments, including the theatre at Dodona and possibly the theatre at Butrint.

Might Kalivo be a Pyrrhic foundation that preceded his famous invasion of southern Italy?

Certainly, Kalivo’s fortifications are, in places, imposing. The walls, probably erected in more than one construction campaign, did not extend to the steep-faced northern side overlooking the lagoon, a feature typical of Greek fortified sites. Access into the enclosure was by three gates, two on the eastern, landward side and one in the southern segment. Satellite imagery shows that the western fortification extended some 230 m further along

The Hellenistic Theatre of Dodona.

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KALIVO: THE VAUNTING AMBITION OF KING PYRRHUS AT BUTRINT

the whole of the western side for a distance of about 580 m.

The fortress encloses a surface area of roughly 23 ha. Remarkably, this would have been over 15 times the size of Butrint’s acropolis (approximately 1.5 ha) in the 5th century BCE and almost four times that of the entire fortified headland of Butrint (approximately 6 ha) in the 3rd century BCE. In fact, Kalivo was by far the largest fortified site in the entire region, second only to the Chaonian capital, Phoinike, where the combined fortifications of the acropolis and lower city enclose an area of about 50 hectares.

Despite the size and grandeur of its fortifications, surveys and excavations discovered that the fortified hill never possessed any major settlement. In their assessments of the hill, Ugolini and, later, Budina found no traces of internal structures. Surveys by the Butrint Foundation in 1995, 1996, and 2001, followed by excavations in 2004, identified some simple structures on the summit, particularly within a stone wall

View of Butrint’s central excavated area: the Hellenistic theatre and rebuilt castle on the acropolis.

enclosure that featured remains ranging from small 2 x 2 m rooms to larger buildings. These intramural structures are perplexing, as they do not appear to represent the remains of an urban settlement. The interrupted building lines and the lack of tumbled masonry surrounding the buildings suggest that the original walls were probably very low or not constructed entirely of

KING PYRRHUS AND HIS COSTLY VICTORIES Pyrrhus (319–272 BCE) was King of Epirus. He is

at Heraclea in 280. In 279, again suffering heavy

remembered today for his costly military successes

casualties, he defeated the Romans at Asculum

against Macedonia and Rome, which gave rise

(Ascoli Satriano) in Puglia. In 278, he invaded Sicily,

to the phrase “Pyrrhic victory.” Crowned king at

capturing most of the Punic province

only 12 years old, he allied himself with Demetrius

except Lilybaeum (Marsala). His

Poliorketes of Macedonia. Dethroned by an uprising

methods provoked a revolt

in 302 BCE, Pyrrhus fought beside Demetrius in

of the Greek Sicilians

Asia and was sent to Alexandria as a hostage

and, in 275, he returned

following a treaty between Ptolemy and Demetrius.

to fight the Romans at

Ptolemy befriended Pyrrhus and restored him to his

Beneventum (Benevento).

Epirote throne in 297. At first, Pyrrhus reigned with

Back in Epirus, he

a kinsman, Neoptolemus, but later organized his

defeated the Macedonians

colleague’s assassination. In 294, he enlarged Epirus

before attacking Sparta. He

first by conquest then by marriage. In 281, Tarentum

was killed alongside his

(in southern Italy) asked for Pyrrhus’s assistance

troops and war elephants

against Rome. He invaded Italy with about 25,000

while fighting in the

men and won a costly victory over the Romans

streets of Argos.

at right: Bust of King Pyrrhus, 2nd century BCE. Photo courtesy of the Naples Museum.

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stone. The scale of the fortifications, the absence of ancient settlement remains, and the paucity of Classical and Hellenistic pottery are puzzling.

LIVESTOCK ENCLOSURE OR MILITARY ENCAMPMENT? Two hypotheses might explain the strange character of Kalivo. Do the Vlach shepherds that Ugolini photographed here in the 1920s offer a clue? Was Kalivo a place for the seasonal corralling of large herds of cattle or sheep? According to the ancient sources, stock raising had always been a distinctive economic characteristic of Epirus. From the time of Hesiod down to the Roman Empire, historical accounts of Epirus repeatedly refer to pastoralism and animal husbandry as the principal source of livelihood in the region. Later, Cicero and Varro describe the Epirotici and Synepirotae as the collective names of wealthy Romans who controlled large-scale pastoral and cattle ranches in Epirus. These Italian stock breeders produced quality goods (e.g., wool, racehorses, and cows) for export to Italy to meet new consumer demands. Julius Caesar, reflecting on his campaigns in the region, dismissed Epirus as “aspera” (harsh) and “montuosa” (mountainous), but noted that while cereals were scarce, the region possessed plentiful supplies of cattle. In his war against Pompey, Caesar’s troops survived on meat and a native root called chara.

Do Kalivo’s encircling walls belong to events when livestock was exported from the valley? Certainly, the construction of such a large enclosure for penning animals would seem to be the work of a community with an explicit purpose. It would have been an entirely different strategy to corralling animals at dispersed

Kalivo South Gate with its distinctive step, 2004.

ranches as found in modern Vlach households.

A more compelling hypothesis is that Kalivo functioned as a fortified military camp and defensive refuge for Butrint’s inhabitants during the Classical and Hellenistic periods. In the age of Augustus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus considered the hill to be the site of an ancient encampment established by Butrint’s Trojan founders. The earliest phase of Kalivo’s fortifications appear to date to the early 5th century BCE, judging from the evidence of its wall typology, the discovery of imported Attic sherds at the site, and the occupation sequence at Butrint. The fortifications might have been erected by neighboring Corfu at about the time when those around Butrint were first constructed. A reference to these defenses appears to have been made

by Thucydides when describing the stasis (civil strife) on Corfu in 427 BCE that emerged shortly after the start of the Peloponnesian War. In this conflict, the oligoi (oligarchic faction), supported by Greek Corinthians and Epirote Chaonians, contended with the island’s demos (democratic faction) allied to Athens. Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War (3.85) reports that 500 Corfiot oligarchs seized the τείχη (forts) on the peraia (mainland territory) and occupied them as a base to attack the revolutionary citizens on the island. The word τείχη is the plural form of τεῖχος, which means fort or the walls of a Greek military camp. Kalivo was evidently the largest fortified site in Corfu’s peraia.

CORFU’S LAST DEFENSE Structures of main enclosure on the summit, looking north.

The focus of the Butrint Foundation’s surveys and excavations within the fortifications at Kalivo was the unique walled enclosure on the southern summit

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Butrint and its surrounding landscape.

of the hill, measuring roughly 70 x 40 m and built of cut limestone. Numerous close-built structures were identified that originally would have consisted of a superstructure of either mudbrick or wood built above low walls. These could have served as living quarters, shelters, barracks, or other installations associated with a military camp. Among the structures surveyed, the most significant was judged to be a rectangular building (approximately 8 x 5 m) on the northern end of the enclosure. It was built of cut stones and boulders similar to those comprising the fortification wall.

Excavation of the building yielded Hellenistic pottery and numerous floor and roof tile fragments, including a large, complete roof tile. Owing to its substantial size and commanding position, the building was interpreted as a key observation and communication point, serving as the principal defense of the northern side of the hill. From here there were commanding views across the expanse of Lake Butrint and along the Vivari Channel well beyond Butrint towards the Straits of Corfu. Historical sources record that Corfu had a large army in the Archaic and Classical periods and that the Epirote tribes also possessed substantial armies in the Hellenistic period. A key issue is surely that the fortifications at Butrint and its hinterland were constructed immediately before Butrint was abandoned

by Corfu (ca. 475 BCE). The rising power of the Epirote tribes, in this case the Chaonians, may have provided the impetus for their construction, perhaps as a last defense of Corfu’s peraia. When the oligarchic faction occupied these defenses in 427 BCE, Thucydides notes that they 22

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were supported by the Chaonians, who must have been in control of the mainland after Butrint’s abandonment and Corfu’s loss of its peraia. The rebuilding of Kalivo’s walls and reuse of the encampment would coincide with the militarization of Epirus under King Pyrrhus.

At the time, the Epirote king fielded one of the strongest and most effective Hellenistic professional armies in the Mediterranean. The Greek cities of Magna Graecia (South Italy) expected Pyrrhus to draw upon a large, well-trained, amply equipped, and ready army from Epirus to lead its war against Rome. As Hammond observed: “It is tantalizing that so much is known of the conflicts of Pyrrhus with Rome and with other states, but so little of his activities in Illyria and Epirus.” Kalivo and its contemporary fortified sites in Chaonia may represent some of Pyrrhus’s martial ambition matching the scale of his professional armies in Epirus.

DO NARROW GATES OFFER A CLUE? In many ways, Kalivo may be compared to Koroni, the fortified hilltop site in the territory of the deme (suburb or subdivision) Prasiai in Attica. As James R. McCredie notes in the introduction to his seminal study, Fortified Military Camps in Attica, “The results of these excavations not only conclusively showed that Koroni was not the site of the deme-center of Prasiai, but provided solid evidence for a little-studied and almost unknown kind of site—a foreign military camp in Attica, and one whose construction could be dated to within a few years.” The site of Koroni had walls that “enclosed an area large enough for a considerable force”

KALIVO: THE VAUNTING AMBITION OF KING PYRRHUS AT BUTRINT

and featured six gates, of which three were posterns of 1 m width and three were narrow gates 1.0 to 1.5 m wide.

The gates at Kalivo are also notably narrow: two are less than 2 m wide and only one is near a regular width at 4 m. The fortified camp at Koroni was built in support of Athens by Ptolemy II of Egypt. It must be noted here that Ptolemy II was not only a contemporary of Pyrrhus, but also had an intriguing relationship with him on account of his father Ptolemy I’s long-standing alliance with Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus’s wife Antigone, Queen of Epirus, was the daughter of Berenice, queen of Egypt and first wife of Ptolemy I. The interpretation of Kalivo as a Classical and later Hellenistic military encampment and refuge attached to the urban center of Butrint conforms to the general framework of Greek territorial defenses.

In this respect, Butrint was no different than a typical polis (city state). As Rune Frederiksen observes in Greek City Walls of the Archaic Period, 900–480 BCE (Oxford, 2011): “In Classical and Hellenistic Greece the walls of a polis-town, the urban center of the polis, were often one constituent part only of a complex system of fortifications of the same polis-state, which included networks of forts and towers spreading out to the most remote corners of the territory.” Recent research at

for further reading

on kalivo

Hernandez, D.R., and Hodges, R. 2020. Butrint 7. Beyond Butrint: Kalivo, Mursi, Çuka e Aitoit, Diaporit and the Vrina Plain, Surveys and Excavations in the Pavllas River Valley, Albania, 1928–2015. Oxford: Oxbow Books. on butrint and its region

Hammond, N.G.L. 1976. Epirus: The Geography, the Ancient Remains, the History and the Topography of Epirus and Adjacent Areas. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hernandez, D.R. 2017. Bouthrotos (Butrint) in the Archaic and Classical Periods: The Acropolis and Temple of Athena Polis. Hesperia 86:205–271.

Phoinike has shown that the defense of the city began with the defense of its territory. In the case of Butrint, the fortified military camp of Kalivo would have served as the nexus of its territorial fortlets, including those known at Mursi, Malathrea, and Çuka e Aitoit. Judging from its comparatively small size in respect to Epirote sites and the large territory it controlled over the Pavllas River Valley, the fortified acropolis of Buthrotum, with its sanctuary of Athena Polias, was simply not large enough to accommodate Butrint’s population as a defensive refuge. All the evidence points to the enigmatic fortified site of Kalivo fulfilling this critical purpose—and being a legacy of King Pyrrhus’s vaunting ambition.

David Hernandez, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Classical Archaeology and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and Director of the Roman Forum Excavations Project at Butrint. Richard Hodges, Ph.D., is Scientific Director of the Butrint Foundation and President Emeritus, American University in Rome. Dr. Hodges is also a Distinguished Consulting Scholar and former Williams Director of the Penn Museum.

He writes a regular column for the magazine Current World Archaeology, which focused on the Penn Museum—“A Museum for the Coming Ages”—in February 2021, Issue 105.

Hernandez, D.R. 2017. Buthrotum’s Sacred Topography and the Imperial Cult, I: The West Courtyard and Pavement Inscription. Journal of Roman Archaeology 30: 38–63.

Hodges, R. 2006. Eternal Butrint: A UNESCO World Heritage Site in Albania. London: General Penne.

Hodges, R. 2017. The Archaeology of Mediterranean Placemaking. Butrint and the Global Heritage Industry. London: Bloomsbury Academic. on king pyrrhus

Plutarch (trans. Perrin. B.). 1920. The Parallel Lives, IX. Cambridge MA: Loeb Classical Library.

All images in this article are courtesy of the Butrint Foundation, unless noted otherwise.

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OUR LANGUAGE IS ENCODED WITHIN US Mixed Media, 2021 Made by: X̱’unei Lance Twitchell and Yéil Ya-Tseen Nicholas Galanin Culture: Tlingit/Haida/Yup’ik/Sámi and Tlingit/Unangax, Alaska 24

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Keeping the Tlingit Thought World Alive

BY LUCY FOWLER WILLIAMS AND X̱’UNEI LANCE TWITCHELL

A new rotation of objects in Native American Voices: The People—Here and Now continues to highlight Indigenous concerns around the themes of local nations, sacred places, celebrations, and new initiatives. A new commission, installed in April 2021, explores language loss and current efforts in the Tlingit language community. “ This collaboration is an homage to Tlingit language speakers, learners, ancestors, and future speakers. We believe that our language is encoded within us, is part of our DNA, but work is needed to avoid erasure caused by American genocide.

Our ancestors and elders endured torture and hardship and handed us a beautiful language that can heal us, but erasure is still possible if we do not find the courage to speak.”

— X̱’unei Lance Twitchell Summer 2021

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KEEPING THE TLINGIT THOUGHT WORLD ALIVE

OUR LANGUAGE SITS ALIVE INSIDE OF US On April 16, 2021, in celebration of the installation of the new commission by X̱’unei Lance Twitchell and Yéil YaTseen Nicholas Galanin in the Native American Voices exhibition, the Penn Museum hosted a virtual event, Our Language Sits Alive Inside of Us, featuring Dr. Twitchell in dialogue with Associate Curator Lucy Fowler Williams.

“The scope of his vision is massive,” said Dr. Williams, introducing Dr. Twitchell. “With methods and practices rooted in kindness and love, he reimagines a future where his grandchildren and allies keep the Tlingit language and thought world alive.” What follows is adapted from their conversation.

LFW: Hello and welcome, Lance! How did you develop this installation?

LT: Thank you for reaching out back in 2019. We started out talking about [Tlingit Assistant Curator] Louis Shotridge and his work. Mrs. Shotridge, Florence Dennis, was my mother’s father’s father’s sister, and so she is my great great grandmother. It’s important to make these connections. I thought about the elders I have been so blessed to work with. When I teach Tlingit, I use a lot of their words. I used to go to them and ask, “What do you want your grandchildren to know? Tell me and we’ll teach it to them,” and, “What do learners of Tlingit need to hear to stay motivated and believe in themselves?” From that I received a lot of wonderful ideas, but this is just a little pebble on the beach of a great and vast land. The things they left us give us such incredible strength and reason to go on. There are ten elders on the poster, and when I started the project, probably six of them were alive. Now there is only one, so it’s a bit of a reflection of the state of our language.

I thought about how to visually represent my teachers. Many photographers provided the original images I worked from to create their images. I was thinking of creating a comic-book-like superhero image of each one because they are so incredible.

Of the roughly 25,000 Tlingit people, there are probably 50 speakers remaining. One of these speakers often came to our class and said, “The language, it’s already inside you.” We built from this idea that so much is an awakening.

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Louis and Florence Shotridge, 1915. Penn Museum’s relationship with Tlingit communities began with Tlingit Assistant Curator Stuwukaa Louis Shotridge, who was employed by the Museum from 1912-1932. As part of his training in anthropology and linguistics, Shotridge worked for two months with Franz Boas in 1914. Their collaboration resulted in the first Tlingit grammar, published by the Penn Museum in 1917.

One fourth to one third of the students who come to study the language are not ethnically Tlingit, but live here in Southeast Alaska. For some who are descendants of colonizers in the United States, to learn an Indigenous language from the place where they live is a beautiful thing because it is a way to say, “I have this complicated history, but I can contribute to an alternative narrative to genocide.”

I envisioned a sculpture that would go in front of the elders. We’ve been engraving silver for a long time, and I had this idea of engraving this repeated pattern of wolf, raven, eagle, and then to spin it so it looks like an abstraction of the DNA strand. This represents the idea that the language is encoded within us.

When you teach a language, there are all the practical elements, such as the sounds that go with each letter. Then you have the abstract concepts and these are pretty difficult to grasp. Then there’s the grammar,

which is one of the hardest things ever! And then there’s the psychology of the whole thing. This is about going up against this huge killing machine of American Colonialism, which a lot of people don’t spend enough time examining. In thinking about this silver strand, yes, the language is encoded within us, but the other side is blank. Each of us has to do something; you have to inscribe the other side.

A lot of folks who come to learn the language don’t realize what they are in for. The neurological act of decolonizing your mind through an Indigenous language is a huge undertaking. When students start to grasp the language, it blows them away to meet someone who can speak this way. I wanted to do what I could to honor the things [the elders] gave us, share their comments with the world, and help people see that if you live in North America (and many other places) there is probably an Indigenous language that may be dying right where

You can raise awareness within yourself and contribute to the health and life of languages, but it takes work and systemic transformation.

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Chukateen | JANE SMARCH It is as if you all are leading flowers in this direction, with the way you are working on our language and our way of life.

Kaajaakwtí | WALTER SOBOLEFF Don’t you all forget it! This wonderful thing that was born on the world, and on the world it saved them.

Keíxwnéi | NORA DAUENHAUER You improve it by using the Tlingit language.

Kaxwaan Éesh | GEORGE DAVIS Only kindness and love, though, put them in your heart! However your life goes out of control, the people you are kind with, maybe they will help you.

Shaksháani | MARGE DUTSON Fight for it, our language! Really fight for it!

Nothing measures up to our language.

Kaakligéi | NORMAN JAMES It was always the first thing, too, they used to always care for them. They always used to talk about it: the place they were reserving for their grandchildren.

Kingeestí | DAVID KATZEEK The way of strength. That is what he says to him: “Be of brave spirit! Life is always difficult. You will not quit.”

Shgaté | JESSIE JOHNNIE Be of brave spirit! Your grandparents are really listening to you now.

Kaalkáawu | CYRIL GEORGE My prayer will be this: let Tlingit exist forever.

Kaséix | SELINA EVERSOM Our language saved us.

KEEPING THE TLINGIT THOUGHT WORLD ALIVE

you live. You can raise awareness within yourself and contribute to the health and life of languages, but it takes work and systemic transformation. All of that is what this piece represents.

When I received the picture of the installation, I was emotional—I miss [the elders] a lot! It was so much fun to hang out with 90-year-olds and talk about how to translate ideas and help people understand the concepts.

I am so grateful to the Penn Museum and to the donors that you could make this happen.

LFW: Your early design draft included one long strand of twisted silver; The final has two strands. Can you talk about the importance of balance in Tlingit thought?

LT: I am a huge fan of Yéil Ya-Tseen Nicholas Galanin’s artwork, music, and vision. We’ve worked on several projects and we talk regularly about ideas. When I approached him about this piece, I said, “Here is my idea, but you are the master silver carver, so whatever you see, you go.” As he started it became two strands.

There are so many things we call wooch yáx̱ yadál (in balance). We have conversations in both English and Tlingit and, in some ways, the inscribed side is the Tlingit and the other is the English. We all have a clan, which we inherit from our mother. All the clans are divided into two sides, or moieties (Raven and Eagle/Wolf ), and historically, you would marry someone from the opposite side. As a male, your children will always be the opposite clan, and when you speak publicly, that is who you address.

This is different than the “living in two worlds” concept, which I think is overly simplified. I like that the two silver strands move and spin.

LFW: Help us understand the complexity of your language and its deeply guttural pronunciation.

LT: We have 61 known sounds in Tlingit. Twenty-four of them are not in English, and of course English has sounds Tlingit does not have—R and F, for example.

Imagine creating a teaching curriculum to play the violin when there is no F sound! We do have the one symbol

Ben Neiditz, left, and Bill Wierzbowski, right, installing Our Language is Encoded Within Us in April 2021.

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KEEPING THE TLINGIT THOUGHT WORLD ALIVE

for one sound relationship and you can learn to read and write fairly quickly. We have four vowels and their variations. Then we get into the thought world ideas, such as how distance and time work in the language.

And the verbs are fascinating. We have, for example, 20 words for swim depending on how you are swimming, and 15 words for carrying something because it depends on what you are carrying.

LFW: How do you keep students motivated to learn?

LT: One of my emphasis areas is creating a safe learning environment. We are doing experiments to consider what would happen, for example, if we broadcast all our classes on the radio. We are trying to find an alternative to the tuition model that higher education depends upon. There are certainly discussions to be had about state funded educational institutions charging tuition to Indigenous students to learn their own languages that were taken by the American education system. We’ve done lots of fundraising and there are scholarships.

Students don’t have to pay anything, and we never turn anyone away as long as they are helping us maintain a safe learning environment. By safe I mean that we must be careful correcting students and giving feedback, and it is always okay to make errors. America trends towards a monolingual existence, which is hugely problematic for all kinds of people who come from other places, speak other languages, or want to hold on to their accents. For Indigenous peoples, if we lose our languages, they are quite likely gone forever.

SCAN THIS QR CODE with your mobile device to hear X̱’unei Lance Twitchell speak in Tlingit and English!

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The Native American Voices exhibition highlights language revitalization efforts by Lenape, Wampanoag, and Ojibwe communities, and of Twitchell’s mentors, Nora and Richard Dauenhauer. Photo by Lucy Fowler Williams, 2011.

LFW: What is a language nest?

LT: As we looked at what was going on in Hawai’i, we learned about the language nest concept. A language nest is basically a preschool that functions entirely in the language with children ages 3-5 or younger. In Hawai'i, they’ve found that if you commit to raising a child in the language, it dramatically increases fluency. Often with Indigenous languages, they lose all the places to communicate, so even though they may be learning the language they have no place to speak. Within a language nest you have conversations with the children and discuss all kinds of things.

The Hawai'i P-20 concept is a language medium education system from preschool through Ph.D, with “language medium” meaning that all content is taught through Hawaiian. This is one of our goals. It is daunting because if you have a language with fewer than 100 speakers, and as few as 10 in some communities, what does this future look like and how do we construct it?

...if you don’t speak it now, you will have to speak a different life.

LFW: Visitors to our gallery can access your video through a QR code on their cell phones and hear you speak in Tlingit and English.

LT: I am happy to have their voices in your museum. The history of Indigenous peoples in museums is infinitely complex. So many of our things are there, and more in a single museum that features Tlingit collections than in an entire community or clan. Some say there are more Indigenous human remains in colleges and universities than our people on the earth. The level of disconnect, trauma, and horror that this brings is something we don’t talk about enough. Indiana Jones is a hero for some, but he is not going in to raid the tomb of King Henry and take the crown from his head. He’s digging up Indigenous peoples, and the glorification of this is problematic. While some things are legitimately acquired, sometimes things are just taken. In our language work we keep things private so that no one will take the things that belong to our medicine people.

The counterargument is that we can bring our voices into museum spaces so you can hear and learn from us. There have been repatriation ceremonies and actions that are steps in the right direction. We didn’t make things to hang on walls or sit in cabinets. These are living things that are supposed to be used. Nora Dauenhauer said, as we lined up all of our belongings, that it was like seeing the faces of her ancestors who are gone. For us, this is part of a huge disruption, and to close these fissures we work on our own language and with partners to say, let’s put some more of our work in there and let’s make some room because we need to get more of our things back home. We need more partnerships and more ideas on how to do that and to construct our own facilities so we can care for those things. We do have hats that are hundreds of years old; We still have them and still use them.

We are an impoverished people who have lost so much, but I think there are ways to work out destinies that are different than what we are being convinced is going to happen, which is language loss and death, and people and things frozen in museums.

LFW: What else should we know about your work?

LT: In Alaska, we are trying to transform education to a place where languages live and are a main part of the curriculum. We are also working on how to create pockets of learners and get them to commit. We don’t want to put too much pressure on our students, but we also must tell them that if you don’t speak it now, you will have to speak a different life. We have tripled our class enrollments.

I am imagining a future where we get the state of Alaska to commit to teaching as many languages as we can, without charging tuition. There are religious, state, and federal entities with a lot of mud on their hands. A public apology goes a long way. This is not an anti-religious statement, but they actively prohibited Indigenous language speech. One individual in this art piece—hearing her tell her life story in Tlingit just breaks my heart. They beat her, scared her, yelled at her, humiliated her, laughed at her—everything they could.

But she did not stop speaking her language. She was such a wonderful speaker: kind, courageous, and hard core! She really informed the work I did.

There are more conversations to be had about social accountability and how we can collectively be more conscious of Indigenous languages and take responsibility.

X̱’unei Lance Twitchell, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Alaska Native Languages at the University of Alaska Southeast, Juneau. He teaches the Tlingit language and courses on writing, poetry, Northwest Coast form-line design, and oratory. His dissertation tackles the erasure of the Tlingit language through U.S. government assimilation. Acknowledging the magnitude of loss and suffering, he charts a solution and creates a curriculum to strengthen and revitalize Tlingit speakers. Lucy Fowler Williams, Ph.D., is Associate Curator and Sabloff Senior Keeper of Collections in the American Section of the Penn Museum. A cultural anthropologist, her research interests include issues surrounding Indigenous identity.

The Penn Museum and the authors would like to thank Gerri and Dolf Paier and George and Elizabeth Gephardt for making this commission possible.

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THE STORIES BEHIND

GS OF N I N A E M NG AND I K BITION A I H M X E E L TH A I NG SPEC I M O C P OUR U

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above: Detail from Andean unku (tunic), 34679. left: Sitio Conte gold disc, 40-13-4.

O

n September 25, 2021, the Penn Museum will open The Stories We Wear, exploring what we put on our bodies, from costumes and armor to tattoos and jewelry. Organized around five themes—dressing for performance, battle, work and play, ceremony, and to rule—the displays reflect how adornment can both communicate and shape identity. Visitors may find surprising connections within the diverse stories told by over 200 objects from the Penn Museum collection as well as the Robert and Penny

Fox Historic Costume Collection at Drexel University, the National Marian Anderson Museum, former Philadelphia Eagles outside linebacker Connor Barwin, Nigerian American former Philadelphia Union soccer player Amobi Okugo, and drag artist Eric Jaffe.

Expedition’s Guest Editor Alisha Adams sat down with exhibition curators Lauren Ristvet (LR), Sarah Linn (SL), and Jane Hickman (JH), along with Head of Exhibitions, Jess Bicknell (JB), to discuss the individual and collective identities behind the exhibition’s ensembles.

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What is The Stories We Wear about?

LR: We started from the premise of a popular exhibit at the Museum in the 1940s on vanity, which basically took all the jewelry we have and put it on display with very little context. But it’s not 1944, so we started thinking more broadly. We thought of Sarah Linn’s dissertation about how people perform personal and group identity.

What does it mean when we put things on? What does that say about who we are? The basis of the show is almost the opposite of the idea of vanity, which says that something is unimportant, or a concern only for women, or that it’s frivolous. What if we take it seriously?

Because it communicates important information about our very complex social identities.

What was the development process behind the exhibition?

JB: The initial proposal was sent in January of 2018.

It grew out of a Museum-wide initiative to become a more welcoming, accessible, and engaging place, and to reflect that in our exhibitions. It’s been a long process because it was delayed a year due to COVID-19.

JH: What we wear communicates our identity, and it also shapes our identity. That’s a cross-cultural thing; you see that in every culture. Adornment can be very traditional or it can break with tradition, deliberately or unintentionally.

SL: Those local stories are what we wanted to bring out with the loans. We’ve got quite a range of material, from Connor Barwin’s football uniform to drag performance to high fashion.

SL: The Museum is always striving to make ancient and contemporary cultures more relatable. What we wear is something that people already care about, even if they reject the idea that what they put on their body matters.

LR: Having an extra year, we could arrange loans we wouldn’t have had time to arrange otherwise. We always brainstorm broadly, and then we focus in. And we presented our ideas to the whole Museum staff during

JH: We started by talking to all the Museum keepers and curators about materials in their sections that haven’t been on display for a while—or have never been out of storage. We got really good ideas from the people who are most familiar with the objects in the Museum, and then went from there and looked for Philadelphia connections.

WHAT’S YOUR STORY? SHARE YOUR STORIES for a chance to be included in The Stories We Wear. Tell us about keepsakes, jewelry, and clothing passed down in your family, or tattoos and body decorations meaningful to you.

1. Take a photo of your keepsake or tattoo.

2. Write a sentence about why it is important to you.

3. Send it our way: Post your photo and sentence to social media and tag #StoriesWeWear, or email us at stories@pennmuseum.org.

Your submission may appear in a digital display within the exhibition. Emailed stories may be posted online.

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Sabina’s Story: My grandmother, Florence, was in love with a man her family forbade her to marry because of his religion.

Filled with optimism, he made her these rings. They never married, but he refused their return and we have passed them down through the generations. I now wear them and am 30+ years into a happy cross-religious marriage.

regularly scheduled exhibitions update meetings. The idea of borrowing a dress of Marian Anderson’s came out of those meetings. We were able to broaden the story of the exhibition in exciting ways.

Did you consider social media and selfie culture today?

JH: We’re asking people to send us photographs through social media of special objects they have and what those objects, or elements of dress, or tattoos, mean to them personally.

LR: I’ve always been interested in the idea that we perform in our daily life. There’s a former anthropology and sociology professor at Penn, Erving Goffman, who wrote a book called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. He thinks about life using the metaphor of theater and performance, and we really took that on here. Maybe because of selfies, because of social media, we’re all much more aware of the ways that we perform life, for example, on Instagram. I think it’s an idea that we get in a way now that maybe wouldn’t have been as obvious to people in the 1990s.

SL: Especially now that we’re all on Zoom too.

Yes, just think of how much we’ve dressed from the waist up this past year. How is the theme of performance presented in the exhibition?

LR: The material we use for that section is a combination of stage costumes and other outfits worn by performers.

We have a Chinese opera robe, a costume from a musical by a Philly drag artist, some runway dresses, and a dress that Marian Anderson performed in.

SL: I think the performance section really gets at the concept of identity. When you put something on as a costume, you become someone else. We hope this idea of performing identity through what we put on our bodies might help people interpret some of the other sections of the exhibition. For example, getting dressed for a ceremony helps you become part of that ceremony and embody the role that’s played in that ceremony.

JH: Even the section we have on dressing for war—if someone is going into battle, a samurai, for example, they dress in a certain way. And it’s not only something the enemy sees, but it’s also what makes the warrior feel strong and confident. It’s definitely performance, but it’s not only about what it does for the audience.

left: Gown worn by Marian Anderson in performance. Image and exhibition loan courtesy of the National Marian Anderson Museum. right: Marian Anderson in 1945. Photo by Yousuf Karsh.

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Peking Opera robe, Qing Dynasty, 29-96-160A.

Kiribati coconut fiber corselet (armor), 19th century, P3294B.

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Are there items on display that have never been displayed before?

JH: The samurai armor, a lot of it is lacquered, which makes it very difficult to conserve as it cracks. And you can’t have it out in a normal atmosphere in a gallery. So that hasn’t been out in maybe 40 years. And the coconut fiber armor from Kiribati—I’m not sure that’s ever been out. A lot of the materials in this exhibition are perishable, so we have to be very careful how we exhibit and for how long we exhibit them.

LR: A lot hasn’t been displayed, or it was displayed, but in 1914. The coconut fiber armor, by the way, is from the collection of Robert Louis Stevenson. It was given to him by the chief when he was living in the area, and he writes about it in his last published book. One of the things Sarah Linn was looking at were the shoulder bags of the chaski runners: the messengers, or sort of Pony Express, of the Inka. They are archaeological textiles, which are really rare.

Andean coca bag, 41-15-16.

SL: Many of them are from the site of Pachacamac [in Peru]. And yes, archaeological textiles are very rare.

They don’t exist where I work in the Mediterranean.

That’s very exciting to me, just getting to look at these archaeological textiles that are 800 years old. And incredibly, the colors are beautifully preserved.

What is the oldest object included in the exhibition?

LR: I think probably the Scythian material is the oldest.

The Scythians are nomadic peoples who lived across a broad expanse of what’s now Central Asia. Today almost all of the Scythian material is located in Russia. We actually have the largest collection of Scythian material in the U.S. One of the really interesting things is, with the rise of DNA analysis, there have been analyses of Scythian skeletons that were assumed to be male because they were warriors, but turned out to be female.

Central Asia is a place we sometimes get textiles because they have been preserved in the permafrost. So we know that sometimes the women were buried wearing trousers. Often people will look at Scythian art and they will think, this person is obviously a man, even if they don’t have a beard. Well, there’s no reason to think that.

It may be right, but we’re just using our own ideas about gendered behavior. left: Japanese samurai helmet, face guard, cuirass, shoulder guard, armguard, thigh guard, shin guards, and shoes, 2003-41-22A-H.

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Connor Barwin, Philadelphia Eagles special assistant and former outside linebacker 2013-2016, Photo by Cal Sport Media/Alamy Stock.

Eric Jaffe as Mrs. Lovesitt in Thweeney Todd: The Flaming Barber of Fleek Street, 2019. Photo courtesy of Eric Jaffe.

How does this exhibition disrupt our assumptions or perceptions?

LR: The coconut fiber armor was worn by chiefs who managed to largely maintain their independence in the face of European colonialism. We are including a model of a samurai that was used for what used to be called Boys’ Day in Japan and is now called Children’s Day. The family who donated this small model were Japanese Americans.

There’s a picture of them with this material displayed in the 1930s. During World War II, the family was interned in camps in the U.S. You can never fully tell the story, but we can at least allude to this. And that provides a very different perspective on the experience of war.

SL: One of those disruptive stories that I had a lot of fun with was the idea of undressing for something, such as Greek athletics. The Connor Barwin uniform makes a really interesting comparison. Modern football requires huge amounts of padding and helmets, and you have to put tons of stuff on your body to function within this sport, whereas the ancient Greeks had an entirely different approach to athletics, which is to get everything off your body so it won’t slow you down.

We’ve included a 19th-century replica of a nude statue of a runner that was discovered at the Roman site of Herculaneum. And we’re also using an ancient Greek vase that depicts boxing in the nude.

Why did you decide to include Eric Jaffe’s costume from Thweeney Todd: The Flaming Barber of Fleek Street?

SL: We wanted to include more contemporary and local Philadelphia stories, and we started thinking about how to diversify the exhibition. Eric Jaffe [who uses they/ them pronouns] provided one of the first loans that we discussed from an individual, and it’s been a fantastic partnership with them. Eric’s costume and their performance takes the character of Mrs. Lovett from the original musical, Sweeney Todd by Stephen Sondheim, overlays historic performances by iconic actresses like Patti LuPone and Angela Lansbury, and then mixes that with Eric’s person and character, the local bearded drag left: Greek neck amphora depicting nude boxers, MS403.

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performer. We display a dress that Eric wears in Act Two of Thweeney Todd as Mrs. Lovesitt. Mrs. Lovesitt has become quite rich, so this dress is really over the top—Eric said “ruffles on ruffles” was the goal. For the queer twist that’s important to drag parody, they added cheetah print lace on the skirt, giant rhinestone buttons, and a tiny crown on top of their wig. But I think all of that stands for something much larger about identity: Eric talked about the really serious need to create a space for queer, trans, and nonbinary roles within the theater. They had auditioned for theatrical roles previously and felt like they had to check their identity at the door and were forced to play heteronormative characters. They’re also excited about this piece as a representation of plus-size headliners within the theater.

Each item or ensemble in the exhibition tells a rich story.

Was it difficult to juggle all the stories that want to be told?

LR: We were really lucky that the Museum’s interpretive planner, Lauren Cooper, is extraordinarily good at her job. Sometimes, as scholars, we don’t see the actual story in an object. We did want there to be a personal

Vajracharya Buddhist priest crown, Nepal, 16th century, A1285.

Hopi wedding wukokwewa (sash) and songòosivu (carrying case), 38780C and E. The long tassels of the sash inside this reed case symbolize rain and fertility.

connection in some way to each part of the exhibition.

So we thought about how to do that with the material, the illustrations, and the text.

SL: One thing that helped was the need to create whole ensembles as much as we could. This is very unique to this exhibition. Some stories we’ve included already come as an ensemble, like the Hopi wedding ensemble, which has a robe, boots, reed carrying case, and sash.

But for others, like the Scythian warrior, we put the ensemble together ourselves to tell a story. We focused on trying to create an individual so that it feels like you are meeting a whole person. We often try to tell an entire story through a single object, but in this exhibition, the ensemble is doing a lot more work than just a single object. And that helped us narrow down the stories a bit, because not everything works as a whole.

JH: Another example of that is the elite Palmyrene woman. Because Palmyra was a major trading center, east and west, we were able to pull jewelry from various curatorial sections that women in Palmyra may have owned and worn at the time. We created the story of the Palmyrene woman in the exhibition, but the objects are real and the story is based on fact.

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What is your favorite ensemble in the show?

JH: For me, coconut fiber armor keeps coming up because it’s so unusual. What’s interesting, other than the unusual nature of the dress and weapons, is that this was a culture that used what they had. They didn’t have metal, but they did have sharks’ teeth, which they attached to their wooden weapons. They had to use what was available in their environment and they were successful.

SL: I think my favorite is the Hopi wedding ensemble.

If you haven’t been married, you’ve likely been to a wedding, so it’s quite relatable. And learning about the ceremony itself has been wonderful. It’s an intensive 10-day long ceremony, if not longer, and everything the bride puts on her body for the final day of the ceremony, which is what we’re representing in the exhibition, is meaningful. The tassels have corn husks embedded in them that symbolize rain and the connection between women and the fertility of the earth. There’s a lot of reciprocal exchange that connects the two families. For example, the men of the groom’s family weave the robe that the bride wears. The other wonderful thing is that in 2019, The Arizona Republic published a large article about a contemporary Hopi wedding. Kara Honanie was the bride and it was beautifully documented, and we were able to take our early 20th-century Hopi wedding ensemble and compare it to this contemporary wedding and actually talk to Kara and to her mother, Sarah, about

the symbolism and various parts of the ceremony. One of my favorite objects is a bowl where, as part of the ceremony, they wash the bride and groom’s hair together.

The intertwining is when they are officially one.

LR: One thing I found really interesting is a headdress that’s worn by a hereditary caste of priests within a tradition of Buddhism based in Nepal: Newar Buddhism.

It’s from the 15th century and I don’t think it’s been on display since the 1950s. It was very hard to get material from Tibet and Nepal in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and we acquired a large collection in 1914.

That was an important way for people to start to learn about what’s going on in this part of the world.

JB: I don’t think I can pick a favorite. I think the strength of the show is in how all of these pieces work together to tell a much larger story. Each object or ensemble has its own deep history and symbolism, but what’s special is how they come together to share the message that what we wear matters.

Lauren Ristvet, Ph.D., is the Dyson Associate Curator, Near East Section, and Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology.

Sarah Linn, Ph.D., is the Research Liaison in the Academic Engagement Department. Jane Hickman, Ph.D., is the former editor of Expedition and a Consulting Scholar in the Mediterranean Section. Jess Bicknell is the Head of Exhibitions.

The Penn Museum gratefully acknowledges the following supporters for making this exhibition possible:

David A. Schwartz, M.D., and Stephanie Schwartz Bryan R. Harris, C83 Adolf A. Paier, W60, and Geraldine Paier, Ph.D., HUP66, NU68, GNU85, GR94 Nina Robinson Vitow, CW70, WG76 Allen R. Freedman, Ph.D., and Judy Brick Freedman, Ph.D.

Jacqueline W. Hover and John C. Hover II, C65, WG67

Janice T. Gordon, Ph.D.

Christine and Robert Reilly

The Estate of Ruth Herd

Helen P. Winston and Richard E. Winston, G48, PAR

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IN THE LABS

Raising the Penn Museum’s Profile as a Leader in Materials Analysis

BY TOM TARTARON

Tom Tartaron (center) at the opening of the CAAM labs in October 2014 with Charles Williams (on his left) and Museum colleagues.

IN JULY 2020, I was honored to be named the Executive Director of the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM), but what a strange time to begin!

COVID-19 has forced me to carry out my duties remotely, but I look forward to Fall 2021, when in-person instruction will once again be the norm, pandemic willing.

For me, taking on the role of Executive Director is the culmination of a long journey in archaeological science. I got my first experiences as a graduate student at Boston University, where I was instructed in ceramic petrography, archaeobotany, and geophysics. Some of that training took place at the Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE) at MIT, where I served after graduation as a postdoctoral fellow and supervisor of the CMRAE labs. During that time, I also learned about ancient copper-based metals from CMRAE’s Director, Heather Lechtman.

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In 2000, I accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale, where I set up a ceramic petrography laboratory and trained students in the technique. In 2006, I jumped at the chance to join the faculty at Penn—and who wouldn’t, given the renowned Penn Museum and so many archaeologists spread across departments and programs?

Before long, I got involved with archaeological science at the Museum. Joyce White (Executive Director of the Institute for Southeast Asian Archaeology and then Associate Curator in the Museum’s Asian Section) approached me about teaching a course in ceramic analysis. With her grant money, we hired Marie-Claude Boileau, now CAAM Director, and the three of us ran the course from 2010 to 2011. A generous private gift enabled us to open a ceramic petrography lab in the Museum’s West Wing in January 2011. This lab became the proof

Tom Tartaron (center) with Penn students at the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (SHARP).

of concept for a new generation of archaeometric laboratories in the Museum that ultimately led to CAAM’s launch in 2014.

CAAM has been a resounding success. Under the guidance of Marie-Claude Boileau, Museum Deputy Director Steve Tinney, and a Faculty Steering Committee, the Center has moved into newly renovated labs, assembled a wonderful team of dedicated and highly skilled teaching specialists, and established a full curriculum that has served over 2,000 students and stimulated much original student research.

Apart from helping the staff get through a difficult year, my focus is on CAAM’s future growth. We hope to physically expand our teaching and laboratory space to accommodate the remarkable interest in CAAM courses and research. Equally, I want to raise the profile of CAAM internationally because, in this short time, CAAM has become a significant center of research and teaching in archaeological science. I hope to attract affiliations with other laboratories, host workshops, and in other ways give our specialists and the Penn Museum the recognition they deserve for their outstanding work. I am excited to take on the challenge of helping CAAM achieve even greater success in the years to come.

Away from Penn, my summers are usually spent in Greece, where I’ve worked on many survey and excavation projects since 1988. I have a particular interest in the Mycenaean Greek world. Recently, I have carried out oral history projects in traditional fishing communities in Greece, Cyprus, and India, which are helping me to think more creatively about small-scale social and economic networks in antiquity. But I have

not turned my back on my materials science background.

I plan to analyze samples of the igneous stones used to make grain grinding mills in the Classical period in the northern Greek region of Thrace—a perfect project for the instruments and reference collections of CAAM’s ceramics lab.

Tom Tartaron is Executive Director of the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials and Associate Professor of Classical Studies.

Tom Tartaron directing surface survey for the Molyvoti, Thrace Archaeological Project (MTAP), Greece.

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LEARNING LESSONS: ENGAGING OUR UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY

Jazz Combos

Dr. Guthrie Ramsey and Bridget Ramsey

STUDENT EXHIBITION INTERNS EXPLORE JAZZ PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURES

BY ANNE TIBALLI

WHEN PENN CLOSED ITS CAMPUS in March 2020, the Museum was two weeks away from opening the sixth annual student exhibition, Living with the Sea: Charting the Pacific. Though Living with the Sea eventually opened in August, plans for launching the next student exhibition for the Year of Jazz were thrown into chaos.

The Student Exhibition Program connects three undergraduates with an academic advisor and Museum staff to create a small exhibition tied to the Provost’s annual theme. In past exhibitions, students explored the health impacts of corn agriculture, the archaeology of ancient Cyprus, and the power of objects to convey stories and ideas. Interns dive into the Museum collections, distill their research into concise exhibit labels, and weigh the design impact of fonts and background colors. They leave with practical curatorial experience and a deep understanding of their subject.

The interns for the Year of Jazz exhibition were chosen for their love of jazz and ability to think critically about a musical form deeply connected to anthropological issues central to the Penn Museum: communication, heritage, connection, and diversity. The interns embraced the shift to virtual programs, learning how to create mini documentaries and conduct pre-recorded and live interviews with panels of experts they had selected.

The result was Jazz Combos, a three-part series using jazz as a lens to examine family, protest, and creativity— and explore how music is both deeply universal and culturally specific.

In the first, “Multigenerational Music,” senior Jessica Greenup interviewed Dr. Guthrie Ramsey, a 44

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professor in Penn’s Music Department and jazz scholar, and his daughter, singer/songwriter Bridget Ramsey.

Using clips from music videos produced by The MusiQ Department and home recordings of family jam sessions, Jessica explored how love of music is passed between generations. In the live conversation that followed, the Ramseys shared stories of first recitals, the difficulties of being professional musicians, and connecting with your loved ones through music.

“I APPLIED FOR THIS INTERNSHIP purely based on the fact that I love jazz music and it has been an integral part of my life for a long time.

This experience reminded me that no matter how well we believe we know something, there is always more we can learn about it. I was able to grow as a musician, a scholar, and a member of a creative problem-solving team. We turned the exhibition internship on its head. My fellow interns and I had to delve into a world of video editing and interviewing that we all had zero experience in, but I loved getting to learn and create something entirely new.” —Jessica Greenup, C’20 The second Jazz Combos program explored the relationship between jazz and protest. Senior Coby Haynes wove footage of the 2019 Black Lives Matter

Coby Haynes protests in Center City Philadelphia (top left) with throughout interviews with and Dr. Nicole Mitchell (top right) and Dr. performances by Dr. Ingrid Monson Ingrid Monson and Dr. Nicole Mitchell. Coby, a music major and drummer with roots in the Baltimore and DC punk scenes, connected the feelings of disempowerment and hopelessness experienced by students during the COVID-19 pandemic with those felt by participants in other forms of social struggle.

The panelists explored how jazz can be used to create alternate realities and soundscapes that suggest more hopeful futures.

“THOUGH I DIDN’T KNOW IT when I applied, the Student Intern program was exactly what I needed. This project gave me a chance to be heard and to make a difference. Despite not having prior experience with programming, hosting interviews, and directing documentaries, having the trust and support of my colleagues and the Museum gave me the confidence and freedom to believe in myself and my own ideas. We faced a few obstacles in working on this project, but at the end of the day, each obstacle proved to be yet another opportunity for us to grow personally and professionally.”

—Coby Haynes, C’21 The final session brought together a neuroscientist and a classically trained musician to delve into the ways that music, particularly improvisation, is linked to creativity. In “Pushing the Limits,” junior Suzanne Carpenter led Dr. Roger Beaty and Dr. David Cutler through an exploration of human cognitive potential, the social and psychological contexts necessary

“BY ENTRUSTING ME with various leadership roles, the Penn Museum helped me to grow personally and professionally. I found myself pushing various kinds of limits, interviewing panelists, moderating a conversation, and undertaking my first significant video editing project. “Pushing the Limits” was particularly relevant to me since the series fused my passions for music, education, and community outreach. Next year, I will be finishing a double degree in music and history, with an urban education minor. As an aspiring teacher, I hope to tap into the educational possibilities offered by jazz and music more broadly. “Pushing the Limits” offered unique insights into the ways teachers could use music to engage diverse learners, encouraging experimentation, innovation, and collaboration.”

—Suzanne Carpenter, C’22 for creative expression, and the power of early musical training to drive personal and academic potential.

Though it will not appear in the galleries, the 2020–2021 Student Exhibition Program has had lasting effects on Dr. Roger Beaty analyzing an MRI (top) and the interns who Dr. David Cutler. poured their own souls into Jazz Combos. Their passion and hard work have shown the potential of jazz to cross academic, social, and cultural boundaries and bring people together, even when we had to be apart.

Anne Tiballi is Mellon Director of Academic Engagement.

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LEARNING LESSONS: SERVING OUR PUBLIC AUDIENCES

“ Museums Are Spaces for Anyone” REFLECTIONS FROM PENN MUSEUM TEEN AMBASSADORS

BY KELSEA GUSTAVSON, SABIRAH MAHMUD, ZAHRA RICE, AND SOPHIE ROACH

Dr. Kate Moore explains the impact of warming global temperatures on animals at Spilling the Tea on Climate Change Teen Science Café, December, 2018. Teen Ambassadors (left to right) Enya Xiang, Zahra Rice, and Tal Netz examine animal bones for signs of distress.

SINCE 2015, the Teen Ambassador program at the Penn Museum has connected teen audiences to the Museum and its resources with the goal of encouraging the next generation of critically conscious adults through an anthropological lens.

October to May, nine Teen Ambassadors meet weekly for two hours to discuss topics important to them. The Ambassadors connect with Museum and University resources to hold informed conversations where, finally, the Teen Ambassadors create Teen Science Cafés: teen-led events open to all high school students consisting of a lecture and hands-on activity. Our hope is that by giving teenagers the

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resources and agency to engage with the roots of humanity, they can radically imagine their place in the world.

“AFTER ATTENDING the Teen Science Café on genetics, I was immediately interested in the Teen Ambassador Program knowing it was a teen-led organization within a Museum. Traditionally, people have seen Museums as bourgeois—a place where lowerincome POC teens like myself do not belong. However, the Teen Ambassadors actively invited teens to be a part of an institution to bring in young adults through open community programming.

(Left to right) Sophie Roach, Tal Netz, and Zahra Rice.

Above, Teen Ambassadors Sabirah Mahmud and Zahra Rice lead a drawing activity to introduce their Teen Science Café: The Imperial Effect: Human Evolution Explained.

From the moment of applying to this very moment four years later of attending our online meetings, the Teen Ambassadors have made an unforgettable impact on me. Our weekly rotating presentations have strengthened my research and public speaking skills, and the constant reassurance from our team has allowed me to take these skills beyond the program to my community climate advocacy. I would not be the person I am today if not for this program and the skills I have been able to gain through my involvement.”

— Sabirah Mahmud, Teen Ambassador (since 2018), senior (rising college freshman), Academy at Palumbo “I BECAME INTERESTED in Teen Ambassadors while attending a Science Café last year. After learning about evolution, I immediately texted my mom all the pictures I took and made a plan to join the program.

Since then, I have thoroughly enjoyed my time as a Teen Ambassador. Although it was experienced virtually, I am still able to do everything I was so excited to be a part of: organizing and leading a Science Café, and meeting and speaking with professionals in the anthropology field. I am able to meet with other teens who are interested in the same topics I’m passionate about, gain a better understanding of the city and history around me, and collaborate with people knowledgeable about the Museum. I was always interested in anthropology and culture but didn’t know how to pursue it. Through Teen Ambassadors, I have the resources to learn about subjects I’m fascinated by. I have the opportunity to examine current events

and things affecting my own community and use that information to educate myself and all participating Philadelphia teenagers.”

— Sophie Roach, Teen Ambassador (since 2020), sophomore (rising junior), the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts “AS A HOMESCHOOLER and self-directed learner, I was drawn to Teen Ambassadors because I wanted more science to round out my curriculum. When I made the decision to join, I had no idea how invested in the program and the Penn Museum I would become.

I have had the opportunity to learn directly from professionals working in the field—archaeologists and anthropologists who always encourage us to ask questions and engage with the resources as much as possible. I was looking for science when I became an Ambassador, but have gained so much knowledge regarding colonialism, social justice, and the complicated history and present of museum work.

Before becoming a Teen Ambassador, I was never entirely comfortable walking around galleries like those at the Penn Museum. I felt like I needed a certain level of education to be welcome there. Teen Ambassadors has shown me that the opposite should and can be true; Museums are spaces for anyone who has a desire to learn.

— Zahra Rice, Teen Ambassador (since 2018), current junior (rising senior), homeschooled in Philadelphia Kelsea Gustavson is Teen and Undergraduate Engagement Coordinator.

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ARTIFACT PERSPECTIVE

Seeing Baghdad in Queen Puabi

Yaroub Al-Obaidi introducing visitors to his country of origin in the Middle East Galleries.

Yaroub Al-Obaidi, Global Guide for the Middle East Galleries, drew inspiration from Queen Puabi’s burial headdress and jewelry to create his sculpture for Friends, Peace, Sanctuary, a collaboration between Swarthmore College Libraries and Swarthmore’s Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, connecting local Iraqi and Syrian people who resettled in Philadelphia with art to explore their experiences of displacement and belonging. His piece, Baghdad, has been exhibited at Philadelphia’s City Hall.

As a Global Guide, what do you want visitors to know about Queen Puabi?

YA: I want them to learn everything. But on each stop I have 10 to 15 minutes. I start with a question: How many pounds of gold can you carry on your head? First of all, it’s not a common material in Mesopotamia at that time. And the other thing is, a woman ruled the city of Ur. [Her headdress] is a symbol of power, and a symbol for woman. Abi is father in Arabic; her name means the word of my father. But she’s a queen by herself. We have no information about her father or her husband.

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Tell us about the unique perspective you bring to the Global Guides Program as a social artist.

YA: When I started in the Global Guides program in 2018, my concern was to introduce visitors to the Middle East now and to tell them stories—to represent the Museum and at the same time to represent [Iraq], my country of origin, and to engage and make ritual around my tour. This is my concern as a social artist: to connect the past with the present to build the future, to make art more accessible, and to tell the stories through me. Each stop, each artifact, has impact on me as well. From here I start to develop my thinking, develop my practice as a social artist.

How did Queen Puabi inspire your artwork for Friends, Peace, Sanctuary?

YA: I used the concept of a powerful woman to be a city; I combined Puabi with the city of Baghdad. She’s a woman, powerful, queen, but unfortunately, she looks ugly. She is occupied. She is arrested. The beads of the belt for Puabi are bullets. The city is suffering, not free. And if you go to the headdress, it looks golden and nice, but there is a thorn behind it. It’s very painful. This is my reflection about the city and what the city survives. Baghdad is a thousand years old. There have been so many innovations there. But unfortunately, it was chosen worst city in the

world to live for a few years. I’m sad for that. So I try to find this relation between Puabi and the city of Baghdad.

Did creating your sculpture change the way you look at the artifact?

YA: I still see the object in the Museum as the best. I made it ugly because I want to share something very sensitive, very critical. I hope by using this very beautiful object, I spark a question: Why did Yaroub do that?

The great thing is people want to see the object in the Museum afterward. I still want people to look at Puabi herself; I want them to enjoy that.

Yaroub Al-Obaidi is a Global Guide at the Penn Museum and a social artist collaborating with cultural institutions throughout Philadelphia. He has worked as a designer, author, lecturer, and as a community leader organizing between the Iraqi community and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). He is a Ph.D. candidate in Media and Communication Studies at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and holds master’s degrees in Socially Engaged Art from Moore College of Art and in Industrial Design from the University of Baghdad College of Fine Arts.

Yaroub’s sculpture, Baghdad, on display at Philadelphia’s City Hall (left) and (right) the funerary headdress and cape of Queen Puabi on display in the Middle East Galleries. Photo of Baghdad by Husam Al-Obaidi.

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MEMBERSHIP MATTERS

Member Spotlight DOUG DIETRICH, WG00 Doug Dietrich, WG00, grew up in Pittsburgh and has been a member of the Penn Museum Director’s Council since 2016. In addition to the Director’s Council, Doug also serves on the Cultural Heritage advisory board and took over the role of Chair last year. He and his wife, Julia E. DeGarmo, C95, live in New York City.

I WENT TO Wharton Graduate School, and even though I was there for two years, I did not visit the Museum. I knew of its importance in the world of archaeology, but I never found time to visit. When you leave school, you are ready to embark on your career.

Then as you get through your career, you realize you need some other things to think about. I needed to use my brain in a different way.

I went to Wharton with [Board of Advisors member] Matthew Storm, and he invited me to come back to the Museum and help. I was already interested in archaeology and cultural heritage, so it lined up nicely. I started on the Director’s Council, then I joined the advisory board of the Penn Cultural Heritage Center (Penn CHC).

I had been on the Penn CHC board for some time and I absolutely agreed to step into the role of Chair and put all the effort I can into helping it grow and develop.

Cultural preservation and heritage are a passion for me, especially with all that is going on in the world.

I minored in religion at the University of Michigan. Studying different religions highlights the

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Doug Dietrich and Julie DeGarmo at the November 2019 Golden Gala celebrating the opening of the new Sphinx Gallery, Africa Galleries, and Mexico and Central America Gallery.

commonalities among them. There is more in common with cultures and religions around the world than differences. The cultural destruction that goes on throughout the world seems so shortsighted.

The vision for the future of Penn CHC is aspirational yet realistic about what we can be. The Penn Museum is a center of knowledge for cultures, anthropology, and archaeology, and I don’t think many people know that. We are still small and we need funding to grow and do more projects. We also need to market what we are already doing.

I don’t think our aspiration is to become the center for all cultural heritage. But I do think that we can become a bigger influence and make connections with other institutions and state departments. We need to let the world know how important this institution is in the world of cultural heritage and preservation.

Welcome New Members!

We were pleased to welcome 93 new members to the Penn Museum family this spring. Member support throughout the pandemic has enabled our Museum to serve our communities more than ever through virtual programs, and to support our staff. Thank you to all our new and renewing members for your support during this time, and a special thank you to members who have gone the extra mile by adding annual fund donations to their membership gift or program registrations.

Envisioning the Future AS WE LOOK toward the Museum’s next chapter, we are thrilled to launch a new recognition society for our most generous donors: the Penn Museum Visionaries.

Through your philanthropy, the Museum has the power to inspire the next generation of scholars and to foster a more understanding and equitable world.

Become a charter member and receive a personal membership experience and invitations to events—in person and virtual—that deepen your connection to our collection and mission. Members are also recognized in the Benjamin Franklin Society—the University of Pennsylvania’s leadership unrestricted annual giving group.

Join Penn Museum Visionaries with a gift of $2,500 and make a significant investment in the Museum’s mission to tell our shared human story, connect with our community, and provide access to all. For more information, please contact Kristen Lauerman at lauerman@upenn.edu or 215.573.5251.

The Stories We Wear: Members See It First!

PENN MUSEUM MEMBERS are invited to join us for exclusive previews, tours, and virtual programs for The Stories We Wear, a new special exhibition opening September 25, 2021 (see article page 32).

Explore how status, personal identity, and ceremony shape the way we adorn ourselves across cultures and throughout time. Drawing from the Museum’s own collections and special loans from partnering Philadelphia institutions, noted athletes, artists, and fashion designers, everyone will find a special piece to relate to.

Members at the Patron Circle level and above are invited to a preview and celebratory reception on Thursday, September 23. All-member preview hours are on Friday, September 24.

For questions or to make your reservation, please contact the Membership Office at 215.898.5093.

Among the special loans to The Stories We Wear is this coral-embellished evening gown by Hubert de Givenchy, executed by Marie Therese of Nice, France, ca. 1964. The gown was worn

by Her Serene Highness, Princess Grace of Monaco and gifted by her to the Fox Historic Costume Collection at Drexel University. Image courtesy of the Fox Historic Costume Collection at Drexel University.

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WELCOME NEWS

Awards, New Gifts, and On the Trail of Smugglers New Gifts and Grants THE PENN MUSEUM is pleased to announce a new commitment to the Building Transformation Campaign from Ina and Lew Heafitz, W58 to establish the Heafitz Building Transformation Fund. In recognition of this generous gift, the Museum will name the Heafitz Gallery on the Upper Level of the Museum, a changing exhibitions gallery currently displaying the special exhibition Ancient Egypt: From Discovery to Display.

The Museum is also pleased to announce a first-time grant from the Sumitomo Foundation in Japan to fund the restoration of 16 watercolor paintings by the artist Goseda Horyu II (1864–1943) depicting important archaeological sites and artifacts from across Japan, including a kofun tomb, haniwa figures, and sarcophagi.

The watercolors were acquired at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago from the Tokyo

Ina and Lew Heafitz

National Museum (at the time the Imperial Museum).

Finally, the Penn Museum Summer Interns program that ran through June, July, and early August was—for the first time—able to offer stipends to every intern through the generosity of program supporters Hara Bouganim, Mark and Peggy Curchack, Janet Klein, Andrew Moelis and Rosa Levitan, and Kerry and Ron Moelis. Our deepest thanks to all of these supporters for their generosity.

Penn Museum Fellow Regina Fairbanks Named Dean’s Scholar REGINA FAIRBANKS, a 2019–2020 Penn Museum Fellow and co-host of the 2020 Women of the Penn Museum Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon, has been named a 2020–2021 Dean’s Scholar by the School of Arts and Sciences.

Students are nominated by faculty from among those with a grade point average of 3.7 or higher. This year’s nine winners were recognized

by Dean Steven Fluharty at a virtual celebration on April 21, 2021.

Regina (Biology) is a Benjamin Franklin Scholar whose research focuses on the study of ancient life at the molecular level. As a Penn Museum Fellow, Fairbanks (who

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uses they/them pronouns) worked in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials analyzing botanical remains from a site in Israel to understand agricultural practices in the Early Bronze Age. They were a National Science Foundation intern at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

Throughout their undergraduate career, their activism has been aimed at expanding inclusion and diversity in science. As a leader of both Penn’s Geology Society and the campus chapter of Out in Stem (oSTEM), they organize recruiting and networking events for LGBTQ+ students. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, they have been honored with a Goldwater Scholarship and intend to pursue a Ph.D. in biology. Congratulations, Regina!

At the President’s residence, Charles Williams (second from left) with Katerina Sakellaropoulou, President of Greece (center), Lina Mendoni, Minister of Culture and Sports (right), and fellow Order of the Phoenix recipients and colleagues from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Shari Stocker and Jack Davis.

Greece’s Highest Honor Recognizes a Lifetime’s Contributions to Greek Archaeology THE PENN MUSEUM is delighted to share that Charles K. Williams, II, longtime member of our Board of Advisors, has been awarded the very prestigious Commander of the Order of the Phoenix by the President of Greece, Katerina Sakellaropoulou. One of Greece’s highest awards, the Order was established in 1926 to recognize Greek citizens who have excelled in arts and sciences, and foreigners who have raised Greece’s international renown. It was awarded to Dr. Williams, with fellow archaeologists Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, on Philhellenism Day, April 19, 2021.

Charles Williams served as the first director of the Corinth Excavations of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens from 1966 to 1997, where he continues as director emeritus. “His 31-year stay in Greece and his devotion to the excavation work in the area of Ancient Corinth have made him one of the leading archaeologists in the world for the promotion of our culture,” noted President Sakellaropoulou. “His love for Greek customs, for the people and the life of the Greek countryside, as well as his intense philanthropic activity, are unique characteristics of his philhellenic personality.”

Greece’s Minister of Culture and Sports, Lina Mendoni (second from right), admires progress on the fresco restoration at Corinth with (left to right) Roberto Nardi, Charles Williams, and Christopher A. Pfaff, Director.

A major project now underway at Corinth attests to Dr. Williams’ foresight and meticulous attention to detail as an archaeologist as well as to his philanthropy. Excavating on the east side of the theater between 1980 and 1990, he found thousands of painted plaster fragments that suggested decoration similar to frescoes from Pompeii and nearby sites. His careful excavation, sorting, and storage has made it possible for a team of Italian conservators from the Centro di Conservazione Archeologica, led by Dr. Roberto Nardi, to now restore the frescoes, as Dr. Williams himself explains on page 4. The restored frescoes will be housed in a new museum at the site, offering new generations of scholars and visitors spectacular insight into life at Corinth in the Roman period.

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WELCOME NEWS

Kevin Calvert Recognized in Penn Pillar of Excellence Awards KEVIN CALVERT, the Museum’s senior building mechanic, was recognized with a 2021 Penn Pillar of Excellence Honorable Mention for regularly going above and beyond in his role by researching and overseeing maintenance and operation of the koi pond in the Warden Garden, a feature beloved of visitors and staff alike. In nominating Kevin for the award, Deputy Director of Operations Melissa Smith noted: “In the koi pond, Kevin noticed lesions, which appeared to be spreading from fish to fish. He did a great deal of research and found

a professor at Penn State who helped him to identify a chemical imbalance in the water, which he was able to correct.” Chief Building Engineer Brian Houghton added that Kevin has proven his dedication to the Museum on a daily basis. “He regularly dons his waders to care for the pond, including its plants, which he selected,” he said.

“The pond looks better and healthier than it has in years.”

Introduced in 2014, the Pillars of Excellence Award recognizes the strong foundation and important support Penn’s weekly-paid staff provide to promote Penn’s success.

Kevin Calvert by the koi in the Museum’s Warden Garden.

To Catch a Smuggler IN LATE FEBRUARY, at the request of Homeland Security, C. Brian Rose, Ferry Curator-in-Charge of the Mediterranean Section, traveled to a warehouse in Jersey City to catalogue 25 Roman mosaics believed to have been stolen from Turkey and Syria. The entire operation was filmed by National Geographic television for their new show, To Catch a Smuggler. right: Brian Rose identifies a stolen Roman mosaic.

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The winning label.

Exhibition Team Honored with National Label Writing Award A LABEL from the special exhibition Living with the Sea: Charting the Pacific was selected as one of 11 winners in the national Excellence in Label Writing Competition hosted by the American Alliance of Museums.

Undergraduates Maria Kiamesso (Kia) DaSilva, C21, Ashleigh David, C20, and Erin Spicola, C20, worked with Museum staff for a year to select objects, conduct archival research, and write text for the 2020–2021 exhibition.

Living with the Sea used seldom-showcased Oceanian objects to explore how symbols and practices related to the sea connect Pacific Islanders to one another and their ancestors. Student curators mined the archives for drawings, photographs, and first-person accounts to highlight the voices of the original craftspeople.

Creating exhibition labels is truly a team effort: the undergraduate Curatorial Interns worked with Exhibits staff Lauren Cooper, Jessica Bicknell, and Kate Quinn, and advisors Adria Katz and Marie-Claude Boileau. The winning label focuses on a detailed drawing of a fishing

scene made by an unidentified Solomon Islander.

Through words and images, the label breaks down the meaning behind each part of the drawing and connects it to the objects on display.

above: Curatorial interns (left to right) Kia DaSilva, Erin Spicola, and Ashleigh David.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

Second Sunday Culture Films DOCUMENTARIES WITHOUT BORDERS

BY KATE POURSHARIATI

SECOND SUNDAY CULTURE FILMS began in 2010, after I proposed a film series connecting the Wolf Humanities Center annual topic to a cultural theme. The Center’s highly creative humanities topics seemed to provide a framework for gathering cultural perspectives.

Each year, I select documentary films made by independent filmmakers from all over the world.

Our screenings are often national premieres and are frequently otherwise unavailable for streaming. We use the term “culture films” deliberately, distinguishing these films from the form of ethnographic films shown in classrooms. The films that we show intend to emphasize culture from an insider point of view.

One year, the Wolf Humanities topic of Afterlives led to ruminations of past, present, and future, which then led to thinking of the human being as a time machine. The resulting film series, called Time Travel, included Australian ghost stories, a farmer in South India maintaining traditional seeds in rebellion against genetically modified crops, and a Bolivian architect making colorful, futuristic, neo-Andean buildings for wealthy Aymara market women.

Another season, the topic of Translation led to the theme of Language is Culture, which provided much fuel for curation. Dr. Jami Fisher, the talented Deaf culture scholar and Penn American Sign Language department head, helped to curate a program highlighting differences in sign language communication across cultures. The film became a springboard for members of immigrant and other underrepresented Deaf communities to tell personal stories of assimilation and otherness in the U.S. The 2021–2022 Wolf Humanities topic of Migration was developed by renowned Penn scholar of African American literature and art, Dr. Dagmawi Woubshet.

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Still from the 2016 film Empty Desert (dir. L. Paganelli & S. Boarini), part of the upcoming 2021-2022 Second Sunday Culture Films series.

that is, borders as they are imposed on Indigenous peoples. This season’s Culture Films series will be called Borderless. One documentary explores how ICE and the Mexico-U.S. border wall have affected the Tohono O’odham people, whose land extends from Sonora, Mexico to Central Arizona. While browsing the hashtag #WeDidntCrossTheBorderTheBorderCrossedUs, I found an interview with Sàmi activist Àslat Holmberg about the division of relatives and disruption of reindeer herding patterns caused by the enforcement of borders in Norway and Finland. This inspired a program of shorts curated from Sàmi film festivals.

The 2021–2022 series also includes films about the continuing challenges of formerly nomadic Bedouins, traditional beekeeping practices as a metaphor for arbitrary borders in East Timor, and the repression of the Uyghur people by the Chinese government. Speakers for this series include esteemed Penn faculty, as well as specialists from other universities, who facilitate an inviting atmosphere in which audiences are welcome to join a conversation.

In the end, we hope to foster greater appreciation for one another and the diversity of human experience.

For future and past program listings, please visit penn.museum/culturefilms.

Kate Pourshariati is Film/Media Archivist and Curator of Second Sunday Culture Films.

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3260 South Street Philadelphia, PA 19104 www.penn.museum/expedition

2021–2022 GREAT LECTURE SERIES

GREAT REVOLUTIONARIES First Wednesdays, starting October 6 Be inspired by some of history’s greatest revolutionaries in this season’s edition of our popular lecture series. This year, you can join us in person in the magnificent Harrison Auditorium or stream it live from anywhere in the world.

For details, including the full season lineup, subscription pricing, and more, visit www.penn.museum/greatlectures.