Volunteers (present)
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Beth Van Horn has volunteered with the Ban Chiang Project for over five years. She retired from Verizon in 2003, where she was a new product manager in the Marketing department. Beth was responsible for the MMAP 2005 website and the internet ‘blog’ that followed the team’s progress. She returned to Laos in 2009 and wrapped up the season by participating in an ambitious exhibit in Luang Prabang that summarized 5 years of MMAP work in Laos. UpDATE articles by Beth |
Interns (present)
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Bailey Benson graduated with honors from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in Classical Archaeology, Anthropology, and History of Art. During her junior year she studied abroad at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome. Bailey is interested in Roman urbanism and city planning, specifically that which is found in Roman Asia Minor and Roman North Africa. For the past three years Bailey has participated in the Gabii Project, a University of Michigan sponsored excavation in central Italy. She has also worked in a ceramics lab, as well as a cast and mold production lab. Currently, Bailey is an intern with the Ban Chiang Project where she is working with the project’s ceramics. |
Work-study Students (present)
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Kelsey Halliday Johnson is Ceramics Collection Manager for the Ban Chiang Project. She is a second year interdisciplinary M. F. A. (Masters of Fine Arts) candidate at Penn Design pursuing a certificate in Landscape Studies. In spring 2012, she will also be an instructor in the Undergraduate Fine Arts Department, teaching Introduction to Photography. Kelsey received her B. A. from Princeton University in Art and Archaeology with a certificate in European Cultural Studies. She has specialized experience managing large, typically visual, databases and would like to continue teaching and working in museums in the future. |
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Jesse DuBois is a sophomore in the Penn College of Arts and Sciences. He is majoring in Humanistic Philosophy, tentatively concentrating in Religious Studies, while minoring in Classical Studies and pursuing a Certificate in French Language. He spent the summer of 2010 in Tours, France, studying at “La Fac des Tanneurs,” and his interests include playing his guitars and writing. Jesse is the current bibliographer for the Southeast Asian Bibliographic Database. |
Volunteers (past)
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John Hastings (his wife Christie to the left) served as a volunteer at the Ban Chiang Project from 1978 to 2002. He designed and oversaw the movement of the huge Ban Chiang data from the original mainframe to PCs, as well as serving as the earliest IT department for the entire Penn Museum. John’s contribution—as a computer expert, as a clear thinker, and as a donor— to the success of the Ban Chiang Project cannot be overstated. UpDATE articles by John |
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Bill Henderson (his wife Barbara to the left) has been a volunteer for the Ban Chiang Project for over 17 years. In his former life, Bill was a partner in a graphic arts company that designed and produced flexographic printing plates for the shipping container industry. Bill started volunteer work at the Penn Museum in 1992 on the Ban Chiang Project, where he worked primarily on developing a ceramic rim typology with data from the Sakon Nakhon Basin, the area of the Ban Chiang excavations. He participated in archaeological digs in the USA and elsewhere before going to Laos. In Laos, his talents supported MMAP teams in the field and in the lab, and included artifact processing, database entry, video documentation and a quietly humorous outlook for every occasion. Sadly, Bill passed away in January 2010, but will be remembered for his hard work and dedication to both projects. Check out Bill’s YouTube video from the 2005 season, “A taste of Luang Prabang”. UpDATE Articles by Bill: Issue #15 “Snake Soup” UpDATE Article about Bill: |
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Cora Arney began volunteering for the Ban Chiang Project in June 2011. Her primary focus was on digitally photographing the Ban Chiang pottery. She is taking detailed photos of how the pots were made, for example whether the pot is cord-marked or has coil joins or both. These photos will be used in the future Ban Chiang Ceramics Monograph. Cora visited the Philadelphia area for the summer and is a student at Northern Kentucky University where Dr. Judy Voelker (Friend of Ban Chiang). was her professor and referred her to the Ban Chiang Project. She is an Art History/Anthropology double major and would eventually like to have a career working in a Museum. Cora is back in Kentucky for the Fall semester of school, but she will be back from time to time to help with photography at the Ban Chiang Project. |
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Heather Saeger is a former volunteer for the Ban Chiang Project. She began her work here at the Ban Chiang Project in June 2008 and worked through August 2009 despite her full-time job at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her first task was organizing the BC offices with Sasha, but her most important work was scanning and archiving the thousands of slides, negatives, and photos of the BC Project. Heather is currently working on her Master’s degree in Museum Studies at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Thank you, Heather, for all of your hard work! |
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David Chamberlin Smith began volunteering for the Ban Chiang Project in April 2010. David’s primary focus is on digitally photographing the small find artifacts from the original field seasons. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of New Mexico, where he learned to love both the field and laboratory aspects of archaeological research. His current hobbies include evolutionary theory and photography. |
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Stephanie White graduated in the summer of 2008 with a BSc (Hons) in Archaeological Sciences from Bristol University (England). She spent ten weeks helping with the digital archiving of images from the Ban Chiang Project. Upon her return to England she intends to apply for Master’s programs in Museology, and to look for further opportunities to work in museums. Many thanks to you as well, Stephanie! |
Interns From September 2010-May 2011, Bounheuang Bouasisengpaseuth, a Deputy Director of the Lao National Museum in Vientiane, Laos, and Sureeratana Bubpha of Thammasat University, Bangkok, studied Ban Chiang ceramics under the supervision of Dr. White, Dr. Boileau, and Professor Tartaron. They are focused specifically on the more than 500 reconstructible vessels excavated by the University of Pennsylvania at Ban Chiang.
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Bounheuang Bouasisengpaseuth is Deputy Director of the National Museum in Vientiane and Co-director of the Middle Mekong Archaeological Project (MMAP) in Laos. His research interests are Lao prehistory and the protection and conservation of Lao cultural heritage. Mr. Bouasisengpaseuth first worked with Joyce White on the 2001 rapid assessment survey in Luang Prabang Province that provided evidence for over 10,000 years of rich archaeological heritage in Laos and direction for MMAP work. Read Bounheuang’s Blogs on the Penn Museum’s website. |
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Sureeratana (Joom) Bubpha is a lecturer in the Cultural Management Programme in the College of Innovation at the University. Her BA in Archaeology-Anthropology and MA in Prehistory are from Silpakorn University. Sureeratana’s research interest is prehistoric archaeology, especially ceramic ecology. She first joined MMAP in 2008, and has continued with the team in 2009. She is interested in learning more about the “big picture” of Middle Mekong archeology, to better understand the relationship between Lao prehistory and the prehistory of northeast Thailand. Read Sureeratana’s Blogs on the Penn Museum’s website. Read Sureeratana’s Article in the Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association |
Work-study Students (past)
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Lizz Chiarelli is our summer work-study student. She is taking over Jenny McAuley’s duties as the Ceramics Collection Coordinator for the Ban Chiang project so we can gear up for the “Year of Monographs”. She is currently a Landscape Architecture graduate student in her third year at the University of Pennsylvania. Lizz has worked past summers with her father, who is an archaeologist, on his projects on a West Indies sugar plantation in the Caribbean. She worked in his archaeology lab cleaning and cataloguing artifacts as well as data entry. Originally, Lizz is from Acton, Massachusetts and did her undergraduate work at Smith College majoring in Geology. |
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Jenny McAuley is the Ceramics Collection Coordinator for the Ban Chiang project during the ‘Year of Ceramics’. She is currently a sophomore at Penn studying geology and anthropology and has a strong interest in archaeology. After going on her first dig this past summer in the town of San Pietro d’Asso in Italy, Jenny hopes to become an archaeologist. |
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Rita DeAngelo was a work-study artist with the Ban Chiang Project from 2004 through 2007. She started her illustrations by making a carefully measured pencil drawing of the object on graph paper. The final illustration is then completed on vellum paper using a stippling technique with lines and carefully placed dots of ink. Check out some examples of Rita’s illustrations on her website. Read more about being an Archaeological Illustrator in the article: “Spotlight Rita DeAngelo”. Since leaving the Museum, Rita has been working for theaters and shops as their paint charge, designing/painting scenery for local Philadelphia plays and various national museum exhibits. She is currently living in Chicago attending the School of the Art Institute’s post-baccalaureate program. |
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Connie Ko is a sophomore at Penn and has been a work-study student at the Ban Chiang Project since September 2008. Last year, she replaced Sasha Renninger as the Ban Chiang Project Bibliographer. She entered new and looked up old resources on Southeast Asia and compiled them in our bibliographic database. In the fall of 2009, Connie worked on the Ban Chiang Digital Archives Project. She left the Project at the end of 2009 to concentrate on her studies at Penn. |
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Elena Nikolova graduated from Penn in 2010 from the College of Arts and Sciences with a major in International Relations. She worked at the Ban Chiang Project her senior year (2009-10) as the bibliographer for the Southeast Asian Bibliographic Database. She spent the Spring semester of her junior year abroad in Paris, France where she conducted independent research on French-Libyan historical relations at the Sciences Po Library. |
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Yanik Ruiz-Ramon graduated from Penn in 2010 with a major in Communications. He started his work at the Ban Chiang Project in 2006 as the bibliographer for the Southeast Asian Bibliographic Database. Yanik is also interested in film production, photography, and languages. He went to Laos as part of MMAP 2008 and served as a videographer. |
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Sasha Renninger served as a bibliographer for two years and also as the first digital archivist for the Ban Chiang Project. She graduated from Penn in 2009 with a BA in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Anthropology and has excavated in both the US and Egypt. She is currently a research assistant for the Penn Cultural Heritage Center. |
