Why are Zach and Courtney Hot Glueing Worry Dolls?

By Amy Ellsworth | Published: March 30, 2012

I walked into the Exhibits office today and saw bags and bags of what looked like little firecrackers. They always seems to have odd bulk shipments back there (fake hair, desiccated fruits, papier-mâché mummy parts), so I didn’t even question what they were doing with them.

Upon closer inspection, I realized they were worry dolls, and Courtney and Zach were shooting them with glue guns. They said it was for the exit experience of the MAYA 2012 exhibit.

To find out what exactly is going to happen in this exit experience, you will just have to go through the entrance first! (Actually, in museology terms, it’s called the “threshold experience.”)

What are worry dolls?

Doubts, fears, and worries about the future are a natural part of life. Worry dolls are part of the folklore of Guatemala that are used to deal with these concerns. According to tradition, the dolls take away your anxiety when you tell them your worries and sleep with them under your pillow.

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Free Hip Hop Concert Tonight! [audio]

By Amy Ellsworth | Published: March 28, 2012

Back in January 2012, local hip hop artists visited the African, Egyptian, and Imagine Africa galleries at the Penn Museum to draw musical (and lyrical) inspiration from the African art and artifacts. The artists, selected by local hip hop radio DJ, Zachariah Hardin aka T.H.E., include godHead The General, Magnum O, Darian The Great, KNomadz, Afloe, and The Urban Shamans. The event is hosted by I-Be 4ever with music by DJ Soul Buck.

Join us in a FREE concert TONIGHT, Wednesday March 28 at the Imagine Africa Community Night. The artists will put on a performance of songs written in response to the African galleries.

Find out more about our Imagine Africa exhibition.

Here is a sneak preview of the song written by Darian C. Hill aka Darian The Great of SoundBwoi Killaz. Read the Newsworks.org article about the project and download this track!

Foundation of Imagination (lyrics)

1. When light first shed down from the Most High Golden

The Land of the First & Last Adam was Chosen

2. Before time was time man is yet anew

The Mother Of All Mothers we all know as You

3. The First Fruit Foundation on which I stand

Know not of segregation only hand in hand

4. Heart to heart together flow rivers of living waters

Hosts of Kings & Queens Royal Sons & Daughters

5. Miles of borders every inch a Beauty

Rich in many cultures sharing the same duty

6. Live love & prosper sums a theme

We’re all on the same team we’re all Human Beings

7. Birthplace of Humanity Red Black Green

Recorded the first steps sowed the first seed

8. Nurtured the first family from then til infinity

Open your eyes & hearts now cause y’all feeling me

 

IMAGINE – Origins of Who You Are

The First to See The Skies Dream Amongst The Stars

Then Fathom a History So Deep & True

It’s Real & Beautiful All For Me & You

IMAGINE Reliving a Past That Never Dies

In The Present Day True Gift In Front Of Your Eyes

Then Fathom All That You Could Want & Even Be

A Powerful Force Living In You & Me

 

1. Visualize society no IPad’s or Androids

Send a message miles away clear as a camcord

2. All from wood hollowed by hand skilled craftsman

No Ikea how to books just all action

3. Guided by the Love of the Land affirms survival

Rites of Passage depending upon the Tribal

4. The instinct to depict medical plants to edible

Thousands of ways communicate & all credible

5. From markings piercings & even some masks

Revealing answers to questions before even asked

6. Hand crafted gems stand the test of time

Paint pictures of a lineage that’s yours & mine

7. For instance 32nd & South Penn Museum

Has something that from young to old eyes need seeing

8. Dare to glare in the eyes of the Sphinx you’ll all see

A History defining the core of inner me

 

 

IMAGINE – Origins of Who You Are

The First to See The Skies Dream Amongst The Stars

Then Fathom a History So Deep & True

It’s Real & Beautiful All For Me & You

IMAGINE Reliving a Past That Never Dies

In The Present Day True Gift In Front Of Your Eyes

Then Fathom All That You Could Want & Even Be

A Powerful Force Living In You & Me

 

1. Blue ink from green leaves to stories carved in earth

From the Egyptian sands to the Cape Coast turf

2. Scale up the highest peaks then swim the deepest sea

Get a Colgate smile from the root of tree

3. Rejoice with the community music is universal

Get everybody dancing in unison no rehearsal

4. Ageless Art Crafts leave years of discussion

Sing songs or make calls with a tool of percussion

5. Millions of species spawned from 1 sole zone

The Mother of life made the whole world her home

6. No child identical but comprised the same

No matter the tree descent the root claims the fame

7. Of hailing from Mama Africa so rich & so giving

Take time learn your history somewhere it was written

8. On the tables of your heart of a land that never dies

So love it or not it’s Africa in you and I

 

IMAGINE – Origins of Who You Are

The First to See The Skies Dream Amongst The Stars

Then Fathom a History So Deep & True

It’s Real & Beautiful All For Me & You

IMAGINE Reliving a Past That Never Dies

In The Present Day True Gift In Front Of Your Eyes

Then Fathom All That You Could Want & Even Be

A Powerful Force Living In You & Me

 

Written By Darian C. Hill AKA Darian The Great

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Behind the Scenes of MAYA 2012: TIMELINE!

By Gabrielle Niu | Published: March 23, 2012

4000 years of Maya history in 25 feet?
SEE IT TO BELIEVE IT with your host Kevin Schott:

Read more about MAYA 2012: Lords of Time opening May 5!

Kevin Schott is an exhibit designer and host to many video productions here at the Museum. A special thanks to Kevin Schott.

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Behind the Scenes of MAYA 2012 – The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan

By Gabrielle Niu | Published: March 23, 2012

The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan is an eight foot-wide, canvas, narrative-oriented “map” that tells the story of the 16th-century conquest of Maya land by the Quauhquechollan and Spanish conquistadores. A replica of the Lienzo is a highlight of the MAYA 2012: Lords of Time exhibit — see the video below to get a sneak peek of the highly detailed canvas mural with exhibit developer Kevin Schott.

Check out this online interactive feature that allows you to explore the Lienzo and also see what conservators were able to accomplish when they restored the original.

Get Tickets for the exhibit, opening May 5th!

Digital restoration Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala. Sponsored by Banco G&T Continental, Guatemala
© 2007 Universidad Francisco Marroquín. All images are available under the Creative Commons license Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike

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Penn Museum in Asia

By Ardeth Abrams | Published: March 21, 2012

Penn Museum has done archaeological research in Southeast Asia for the past 45 years. I have been lucky to work as an archaeological illustrator for one of the Penn projects, the Ban Chiang Project, since I was a grad student in the Penn Fine Arts School in 1990. Over the years I took on web duties and most recently put together a video interview of my boss, Dr. Joyce White, Associate Curator of the Asian Section of the Penn Museum. Dr. White was asked to provide a brief video on her experiences with Penn’s Luce Program for Asian Archaeology for use by the Luce Foundation.

In the video we used archival images from past Penn excavations in Thailand, as well as recent still images from Laos and the Museum, plus footage filmed by Amy Ellsworth when she visited the Middle Mekong Archaeological Project (MMAP) in 2010 in Luang Prabang, Laos. Read Amy’s 2010 Blog.

This video will be combined with those from other institutions receiving Luce grants for Southeast Asian archaeology (Universities of Hawaii, Washington, and Illinois), and will be used for PR purposes by the Luce Foundation.

It was a bit of a rush job and turns out, it was my first stab at putting together a short interview of this sort. But I was up for the challenge.

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Dead Men of Duffy’s Cut

By Amy Ellsworth | Published: March 15, 2012

More than 175 years ago, a ditch in Chester County became a mass grave for 57 Irish immigrant railroad workers, thought to have died of cholera. Now, a team that includes a Penn scholar and student is digging deeper into the lives – and deaths – of these laborers.

Dr. Janet Monge, curator of physical anthropology at the Penn Museum, and Samantha Cox, from the department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, joined the project in spring 2009, when workers’ bones were discovered at the site. Read more from Penn Museum

From the University of Pennsyvania YouTube Channel. Text by Greg Johnson. Video by Kurtis Sensenig.

“Fifty-seven Irish workers set sail for the United States in April of 1832 to work at Duffy’s Cut, a Pennsylvania Railroad construction site in Malvern, a city about 20 miles outside of Philadelphia. The workers arrived in Philadelphia in June. By the end of August, they were all dead.

The railroad company maintained that the workers died of cholera. But William Watson, a history professor at Immaculata University, says he believes they were executed.” Read more

 

 

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“Get Your Fiber On!”

By fran | Published: March 7, 2012

Detail_PachacamacTextile29723

Last Friday, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter proclaimed March “Fiber Art Month” during the opening ceremony of FiberPhiladelphia 2012!  In honor of that proclamation, I wanted to post a few photographs of some inspiring ancient Peruvian textiles I’ve seen during my IMLS-funded condition assessment survey.

With simple tools, every process of textile manufacture was by hand. The thoughtful designs, the striking use of color combinations, and sophisticated craftsmanship amaze me on a daily basis.  For those who appreciate the brilliant artistry of ancient civilizations, here are some photographs to knock your socks off.  As modern textile designs are heirs to ancient traditions, here’s to the contemporary fiber artists being inspired by the past but creating new and exciting work!  “Get Your Fiber On!”

Detail _PachacamacTextile30074

 

Detail_PachacamacTextile30027

 

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Ancient Yo Mama Jokes on the Colbert Report

By Amy Ellsworth | Published: March 5, 2012

Last Friday, my Facebook feed was flooded with comments about our cuneiform tablet that made it onto the Colbert Report in a spot about ancient yo mama jokes.

Our tablet fragment, featured in the original scholarly article in Iraq, originates from Sippar (modern-day Abu Habbah, Iraq just southwest of Baghdad) during the Old Babylonian Period (1900-1600 BCE). The script is in Akkadian, a semitic language used in Mesopotamia between 2,800 BCE and 500 CE.

Cuneiform tablet fragment from Sippar. Penn Museum object CBS 01399.

This lovely “fat cross” scan was digitized by the Babylonian Section of the Penn Museum as part of  co-operation with the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative  funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Most of the tablets were used as writing exercises for young scribes-in-training, so it’s no wonder some of the students got a bit punchy and trailed off on their own bawdy riddles. Our scribe, however, was a bit more restrained. On our tablet, “various persons are addressed and told to give up evilness.”

The writers at Huffington Post and Discover Magazine admit the jokes don’t really stand the test of time or translation. If comedy is tragedy plus time, maybe these tablets need to sit around in storage a bit longer.

By the way, if you want to impress your Facebook friends, you can write your name in cuneiform and post it on your wall. Or you can try to fit in a punchline to your favorite yo mama joke.

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Retro Mashup International

By Kate Pourshariati | Published: March 1, 2012

In which Penn Museum’s Film Archives announces a new occasional series: Live from the Archives!

One great pleasure of archival work is to see what creativity researchers bring to interpreting the materials in our Museums’ collections. Once, their output consisted mostly of print publications using these primary source materials, more recently, artists and filmmakers are discovering digital visual materials in the re-use of our film and other collections. Most excitingly, often these filmmakers come from the cultures of the people in the films.

Keep your eyes open for the following screenings:

From the 1930s to the early 1970s, the Chinese in Jamaica owned many small grocery stores all over the island. They were an insular group and mostly kept to themselves. The documentary “The Chiney Shop” explores the ways in which the Chinese shopkeepers contributed to Jamaican society.

The Chiney Shop Trailer from Jeanette Kong on Vimeo.

  • Maren Elwood’s film, Stone and People is about the tension between land rights of current day Inca people and archaeological field work and antiquities preservation. The particular Kate and Arthur Tode collection film reel from Peru that Maren culled from was preserved in a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation in 2007, the first of four that we have received for our film collections. It is gratifying to learn that we selected to preserve a film that turns out to have relevance to a large audience in Peru, and will be reborn in a new context some eighty years later. (Imagine Kate and Arthur’s  spirits in surprise to see that they are heavily featured in a new film!) We expect to present this film in late 2012.

 

  • The latest collaboration with a filmmaker involves a Fulbright project in India about Victorian colonial period female travelers, which she will contrast with current day internet consumption (virtual travel) by South Asian teen girls. The filmmaker, Courtney Stephens, currently researching in Kolkata(formerly Calcutta), will be working with the Dixon and Tode collections for this film. which is titled Venus Peregrine. No date has been yet set for this screening, since it is still in production, but likely it will be in Spring 2013.
  • Stay tuned for more details! 
Posted in Archival Practice, Archives Video, Cultural Heritage Preservation, Museum, video | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Penn students gain a window into current Museum research

By bethvanhorn | Published: February 16, 2012

How many undergrads get to see current archaeological research up close—as in, under a microscope? The 15 Penn undergraduates taking Dr. Marie-Claude Boileau’s new Spring semester course “Archaeology and Science” got to view samples of ceramic and metal objects from Ban Chiang, a site excavated by Penn Museum in Northeast Thailand. One year after the Museum’s Archaeological Ceramics Lab opened, it is bustling with classes, students, and researchers.

Image 1
Students in Dr. Boileau’s course are looking at ceramics and clays from Ban Chiang in the Museum’s Ceramics Lab. This hands-on experience with thin-section petrography, using the Lab’s transmitted-light microscopes, helps demonstrate if pots were made locally or in another village far away. Petrography is also a powerful tool for technology-related questions, such as how potters processed the raw materials (clays and tempers) and how pots were made and fired.

 

Image 2
Annie Chan, a student in the course, is examining hand specimens with matching thin sections from the Ceramics Lab rock collection.

 

Image 3
Dr. Elizabeth Hamilton, guest lecturer in the course, shares her knowledge of archaeometallurgy with the undergrads. One of the microscopes in the Ceramics Lab can also be used for metallography, the microscopic observation of metal objects. Here, Dr. Hamilton, the metallurgist for the Ban Chiang Project, is showing students the steps to identify how a metal object was made, using reflected-light microscopy. Analysis of this sort helps to demonstrate how different cultures manufactured metal objects, such as ornaments, tools, and weapons. This study can also show the level of sophistication of past technologies and how metal artifacts were used.

 

Image 4
A photomicrograph from a Ban Chiang metal droplet. The large blue shapes show that the object is a droplet of tin bronze, probably splashed out during casting, and was allowed to cool.

About the author: Beth Van Horn has volunteered with the Ban Chiang Project since 2004. 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 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.

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