Kelsey Wingel and Jacob Bridy photographing ceramics

Jacob Bridy works at the Penn Museum as a work-study employee, meaning that this is part of his education as a student at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in paleobiology.  Jacob has been working with Ainslie and Fran on the Pachacamac project since October 2011, mainly helping to photograph and remount the textiles and ceramics from the site. He hopes to someday work in a museum much like this one and is enjoying his experience here.

Kelsey Wingel is a sophomore at the University of Delaware, double-majoring in art conservation and art history. Art conservation first caught her interest in high school when she was assigned a research paper on the Shroud of Turin. Her classes in art history only added to this initial interest. While she has already started honing her treatment skills and learning about preventive conservation in this internship, Kelsey hopes to gain further experience interning over her summer and winter breaks with the final goal of continuing her art conservation education at the graduate level.

Elissa Meyers vacuuming ceramics

Elissa Meyers, a Minnesota native, has her Bachelor of Science in Industrial Design from The University of the Arts. For the past year and a half she has been working with natural dyes and teaching various workshops on growing and using natural dyes. Her interest in the chemistry and design of objects has given her a deep appreciation for work done in the conservation field. She currently is working to gain the experience necessary to get into a graduate school program for art conservation. Not only is she interning with us on the Pachacamac project, she is also assisting a local conservator in private practice, and the curatorial department at the Franklin Institute.

Natalie Kendall moving ceramics

Natalie Kendall is a University of Delaware student (transferring in the fall of 2012 to another University) working towards an undergraduate degree in Anthropology. After attending an archaeological field school on Catalina Island, Natalie’s interest in prehistoric archaeology became a passion and she is now working towards the goal of becoming an archaeologist. She is volunteering at the Penn Museum to gain hands on experience with artifacts and to learn about the conservation and care they receive after leaving the field.

WHYY’s Newsworks.org reported on the event in their article At Penn museum, art of Africa resonates with musicians.

In a free concert at the Imagine Africa Community Night on March 28, the artists, including godHead The General, Magnum O, Darian The Great, KNomadz, Afloe, Urban Shaman, DJ Soul Buck and Host I-Be 4ever, will put on a performance of songs written in response to the African galleries. Watch the video below to see how the artistic process begins:

A little boy holding a slate or chip chart to identify a scene ( # 27414)

Regular readers of the Penn Museum blog may recall a post about an exciting film re-identification and discovery, in which we realized that the film that we thought was The Kid was really called The Hoax (1932) and that a copy was in the collections of the Smithsonian.

By way of University of Pennsylvania’s Dr. Greg Urban this year we made contact with an anthropologist in Brazil, Dr. Sylvia Caiuby Novaes, who had worked over many years with São Lourenço Bororo people in the area proximate to where both The Hoax and Matto Grosso, the Great Brazilian Wilderness (1931), were made.

We were hoping to take the films back to the area to get true translations of the Bororo language (Boe Wadáru) to Portuguese and English, and to see what people felt was interesting or useful about the films. Just a few weeks ago, we received copies from Dr. Novaes, with the new subtitles burned in. It is thrilling to see the Portuguese and Boe Wadaru directly translated to English, giving a more direct experience to what the people in the films are saying.

To our knowledge, this film was and remained the only documentary film in which non- European people speak, from the advent of sound recording for film until about 1965. Our scholarship on this will be published in an article in 2012, together with an article about the experience of returning the films, to be published by Dr. Novaes after a conference presentation in Brazil in 2012.

Dr. Novaes reports that the people of the Tadarimana village were delighted to watch the films and asked for copies, she was able to leave ten copies there. We appreciate the work of Dr. Novaes and her Bororo partner, Beatriz in getting the films translated. In all of this it seems ends of a larger circle come together.

Erin Jensen, from our Community Education Department, sent me a few photos to post on the Loan Box webpage and I couldn’t resist giving these two young gentlemen a place of honor on the blog. Erin said their teacher, Ms. Kim, often brings her class to the Museum and is an enthusiastic supporter of the education programs here. I can tell by the looks on these kids’ faces that she does a great job transmitting her enthusiasm through to her students. I’m sure most kids are more than happy to hold a bone axe, but they also seem genuinely eager to learn about them.

The basket that Mr. Tymair is holding is an example of the baskets woven by the Makah people who reside on the Olympic peninsula of Washington state. They typically have a light background with small, brightly colored designs.

Caption from the image: George Tilden, 1st Mate, who brought the mail 4000 miles overland; five months en route

The photograph was taken by Edward Avery McIlhenny, an ornithologist who ventured to North Alaska in 1897.  His main goal was to collect birds and mammals at Point Barrow for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, but he also made collections for the Penn Museum.  He deposited 1589 ethnographic and archaeological objects at the University of Pennsylvania, for which he received payment of $3,500.  He also gave the museum his artifact ledger, in which he recorded each object, its ‘artifacts provenience’, English and native name, and descriptions of how it was made or used. The Penn Museum Archives currently houses McIlhenny’s photographs from the trip, as well as letters and his ledger.

Imagine Africa media sponsor WDAS has been out in the community talking up
the Imagine Africa project.  In November, the WDAS street team was out at
the Universal Circus.  Look for the WDAS team out in the community this
winter and spring!

Looking for cheese on the Penn Museum Online Collections Database.

Just this week, the Penn Museum launched its Online Collections Database. This brand new resource currently encompasses over 314,000 object records and is illustrated with 46,000 images, stats that are expected to increase as the project moves forward. A keyword as well as an advanced search allow users to casually browse or specifically search for objects. A search for “cheese” unexpectedly turns up this terra cotta figurine carved in moulded relief from Iraq. Apparently, depicted on the tripod table in front of the male figure is a collection of stacked, rectangular objects that could be cheese. The “Highlights of the Collections” section includes a number of particularly important pieces from the Museum. A “Featured Themes/ Collections” section highlights the collections in fun ways – like exhibiting objects that depict faces. Additionally, an interactive feature allows the user to create his or her own collection of objects and share it with others. I can even make this exciting collection of early Chinese funerary objects and share it with you here! All in all, this database is an incredible and useful resource that makes the Museum’s collections open and accesible to many more people.

The excavation in 1896 close to the Temple of Pachacamac.

This mummy bale of a child is constructed of cotton textiles over a basket framework. Object No. 26626. Height: 0.94 m

Starting in January of 1896, Max Uhle began his excavation of the Pachacamac cemetery in Peru. The site consisted of graves from different eras, but the best preserved layer dated from the late 6^th century CE. From this site, the Museum has many objects in its collections (click here to see a few). The tombs from the 6^th century layer were built of stone and mud brick in a conical shape. Inside these tombs, Uhle made the extraordinary find of mummies wrapped in basket-framework bales stuffed with leaves of local trees, topped with a false head made of wood with human facial features. It seems as if the preservation of these mummies were due more to natural processes than to any sort of artificial mummification processes.

Location of Pachacamac along the Peruvian coast.

X-ray of the skull of the mummy in bale No. 26626 highlighting the separation of bone plates.

The x-ray of bale no. 26626 revealed a corpse positioned in a tightly curled position, wrapped in cotton padding. The padding made the exact contents of the bale hard to determine from the x-ray images. The presence of a bronze object, potentially a shawl pin or topu worn by women, near the chest of the mummy suggests that the child was a girl. The smaller bones and presence of adult teeth that had not yet erupted suggest that the the girl was approximately 12-years old at the time of her death. Additionally, the x-ray revealed a potential cause of death; there appeared to have been “keying” or separating of the bone plates in the child’s skull, indicating a serious skull condition such as a tumor. It is curious that the x-rays show no evidence of medical procedures attempted to treat the girl’s condition. Given the burial’s proximity to the main Pachacamac shrine, the family would have been of high social standing, and most likely not lacking in material wealth. Click Here to read the Expedition article by Stuart Fleming.

Meet the Nkisi Nkondi. These sacred items were carved by the people of the Congo, and used for protecting the village, fighting evil spirits, settling disputes, and sealing agreements. Each nail driven into the figure represents the taking of an oath, the finalization of a contract, or some other situation when the Nkondi’s power was invoked. If the agreement was broken, the Nkondi would would seek revenge and punish the guilty.

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These Mütter Museum/Penn Museum double tickets are available for sale exclusively at the front desk of both museums. Cost is $20, adults ($4 off regular price!), or $14, students, seniors and military with valid ID (up to $3 off); museum info and directions are available here. Tickets are valid for one year after purchase, and you needn’t visit both destinations in the same day – but what a marvelous day that would be, wouldn’t it?