The excitement of discovery was the compelling force responsible for the founding of the University Museum in the last century. It is still the force which maintains the Museum in 1954 as a unique institution in Philadelphia. There are now sixteen members of the professional staff of the Museum who are actively engaged in archaeological and anthropological field research throughout the world. Following a tradition established in 1890 when the Museum sent the first American expedition to Babylonia, these men and women during the past year have carried on their explorations in Turkey, Cyprus, Afghanistan, Egypt, San Salvador, New Britain Island, Australia and Arctic Canada-during the past few years-in Honduras, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, Southeast Asia, and Alaska. In the past five years the Museum has maintained a more active field campaign in the study of man than any other institution in the world.
To maintain perspective in this generation it is necessary to remember that these Stone Age men arc still living in the mountains of New Guinea. Some tribes were not discovered by the western world until 1932. Ward Goodenough, on a University Museum expedition in 1951, photographed this group of Opiya men in the Kukukuku fountains of New Guinea. Ward is now leading another of our expeditions to the Island of New Britain, just off the coast of New Guinea. With him for six months in the field are four graduate students in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. Such training of future anthropologists in the field is one of the traditional functions of the Museum.
Any research is a gamble. Much of it produces little of real significance, some results in important discoveries which are not actually recognized until a later generation; rarely there is a discovery which achieves immortality in the world of learning. It is the hope of such a discovery which puts the edge on the excitement of research both for the professionals and for the men who finance and direct the work.
Research in the history and behavior of man, like any other research, must be painstakingly slow and thorough, often prosaic, and sometimes discouraging. But it has a fundamental fascination for all men simply because nothing interests human beings more than themselves.
We of the Museum staff, realizing the existence of this general and natural interest in such research, have become increasingly concerned about the expanding area of misunderstanding between the specialist and the layman. All men are laymen in most fields and usually, in this generation, specialists in one. Unhappily many of us have become so specialized that we deal in word symbols, the actual meaning of which we ourselves no longer seek to know. Perhaps one of the tragedies of the present age of technological revolution is precisely this growing hiatus between specialization and understanding. Schools are forced into more and more specialized training to meet the demands of our society even though many leading educators lament the trend. Is it not possible that museums, which are essentially public institutions, can and should assume the role of interpreter between the specialist and the rest of us?
The Roman city of Curium on the south coast of the Island of Cyprus was destroyed by an earthquake in the fourth century A.D. That was the death of a city which had been living for many centuries during Greek and Roman times. On the same site in fact men have lived since neolithic times-perhaps 10,000 years ago-and there is today near the ruins of Curium a pleasant little village of Greeks and Turks called Episkopi.
George McFadden, until his tragic death in a sailing accident off this same coast in 1953. spent many years excavating the city for the University Museum. Some of the temple of Apollo has been restored, much of the theater can he seen intact, and many other sections of the city are preserved as a national monument of Cyprus. Above is a stone walled tomb of the fourth century B.C.
The University Museum was founded by a small group of enlightened and responsible people in Philadelphia who thoroughly understood the significance of the dramatic archaeological discoveries in the nineteenth century. They were not specialists. They built, financed, and maintained the Museum until it achieved international fame in the last generation. The same kind of people direct the policies and the activities of the Museum today as its Board of Managers. As laymen, they must attempt to determine what is significant in our present and future researches. For them, the professional researchers on our staff are naturally obliged to interpret their results so that they make sense to someone who is not a specialist. In this lies the vitality of the Museum today as in its early years.
We here at the Museum have no doubt about our obligation to “make sense” for the intelligent person. It is one of the essential functions of an institution which is both a public and a University Museum. Interpretation of research in the study of man is second only to the research itself.
As an integral branch of the University of Pennsylvania, following a reorganization in 1938, the Museum has a specialized role as an institution for advanced instruction in the professions of archaeology and anthropology and, since 1947, the curators have all become members of the faculty of the University. One of their responsibilities is the training of specialists in these fields. Recently some of us have added, through particular departments in the University, general courses for undergraduates in these subjects, believing that our role of interpretation should extend to the unspecialized university student as well as to the public.
Linton Satterthwaite of the American Section has been working for many years recording and interpreting the ancient civilization of the Mayas in Middle America. One of the great mysteries in archaeology is the origin of these civilized people of tropical America. The monument above, being packed for transportation from British Honduras to Philadelphia, is covered with Mayan glyphs. Maya scholars can decipher the dates of such monuments (this one, about seventh century A.D.), but they are still unable to decipher other glyphs and so, like Minoan Linear A script, ancient Mayan remains a puzzle for the cryptographers. Several great stone monuments excavated by Satterthwaite at Caracol in British Honduras during the past two years have just been installed in the Mayan gallery. See plate opposite.
But, as Philadelphia’s museum for the study of man and as one of the world’s leading museums of ancient and primitive art, we must follow the original tradition of the Museum and turn outward, from specialized research for the University alone, to the public at large. Today, only a very few museums (and those relatively inactive) can operate on private funds and private gifts. Almost all museums in America are now financed at least in part by public funds. Moreover, the public in general has become very much aware of museums, general attendance is rising everywhere, and many museums have become civic and cultural centers for all kinds of public activities. No one can predict what the new museum will be but many of us are sure it will be very different from the museum of the past.
The University Museum has moved from a privately financed institution to one partially financed by general University funds, and judging from what is happening all over America, it will move to one financed at least in part by the public. In the meantime, we have made changes which would startle the last generation, and are constantly experimenting with various ways of utilizing the Museum to meet the new demands of the public. But, in spite of all these changes in the Museum itself, we maintain the tradition of our two essential functions, original field research and interpretation of this research for the intelligent public.
Everyone has heard of King Midas, his golden daughter, and the Gordian knot. All this has to do with the Phrygian people who lived in the highlands of central Turkey for several centuries before Herodotus wrote his first history of the world. This ruined city, above, now being excavated by Rodney Young and Roger Edwards for the University Museum, is the capital of Phrygia. Workmen are near the gate of the fortified city of Gordion which Alexander conquered in the fourth century, B.C. It is here where he is said to have cut the Gordian knot tied to the chariot of the king. Below the level where these men are working we have subsequently found the vast wall and ruins of the more ancient Phrygian city (eighth century, B.C.) as shown in the picture at left. The huge mound in the background, above, height 150 feet, mav well be the tomb of King Midas. In any case, smaller tombs, like it, already excavated by our expedition, were built by Phrygians of the age of Midas.
This Bulletin of illustrations, I hope, will show, better than I could explain, the present nature of the Museum. It may also suggest to our friends, both old and new, the direction in which we are moving.
The Board of Managers, the members, and the staff of the Museum seem to me a very distinguished company-one which maintains a proud tradition in Philadelphia and in the world of learning. Our business is to speak clearly of our studies to all those responsible and intelligent people who have a natural intellectual curiosity about the history of men. To those people we all extend a hearty invitation to “come aboard” as contributing and participating members of an institution which is dedicated to discovery.
All photographs in and around the Museum arc by Reuben Goldberg unless otherwise indicated.
Archaeology in the field is not all shovels, dust, measurements and architectural ruins. Above, Dorothy Cox, of our Mediterranean Section, helps a young Turk clean twenty-five-hundred-year-old pots from the Phrygian city at Gordion. Dorothy is our expert on coins and she has recently been with our expedition in Afghanistan as well as in Turkey. All of the Americans with the Gordion excavation are enthusiastic about Turkish workmen-just as United States Army officers in the Turkish Artillery School are enthusiastic about Turkish soldiers-and this is important to the success of any of our digs. The Turks (right) are villagers and diggers on holiday watching a traditional finger-puppet performance during the season of 1953. Image Number: 45986
In the summer of 1953 Rodney Young made a sondage beside the city wall of Balkh, north of the Hindu Kush. Above, Afghan and Mongol workmen are probing down to the postern gate.
Graduate students in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania often find themselves in queer places. Here, Alex Ricciardelli is shown with a rubber boat in which he and Louis Giddings, of our American Section, traveled from Pt. Barrow to the mouth of the Mackenzie. Louis tells us that Alex, on his first trip in the Arctic, assumed that this was all quite safe under Giddings’ guidance and did not realize until afterwards what chances they took far out in the open pack ice of the Arctic coast. They were searching for sites occupied by the ancient Eskimo and for driftwood which Dr. Giddings has been using to make studies of prevailing Arctic currents and climatic changes.
Archaeology is not limited to far corners of the world like Afghanistan. Here, members of the Museum staff (Mary Butler Lewis), of the Board of Managers (Brandon Barringer), students (T. A. Carter) and Museum members (Mr. Rosengarten and Mr. Lewis) are excavating an Indian rock shelter near Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, this particular rock shelter produced nothing. The local diggers are not discouraged. They have continued at a site near Bryn Athyn and more recently on the Brandywine. There are astonishingly few recognizable Indian sites for archaeologists in the vicinity of Philadelphia, even though a great many stone tools are found in the cultivated fields. Collectors can find most of the types in the Museum exhibitions.
The men who direct and support the world-wide expeditions of the University Museum are the members of the Board of Managers. There are twenty members, representing both the University of Pennsylvania and the City of Philadelphia, and they direct the internal affairs of the Museum as well as the research abroad. Mr. Percy C. Madeira, Jr., President of the Museum (below, right center), is presiding at one of the regular monthly meetings. Image Number: 183125
One function of the Board is to select ancient or primitive art objects which are to be purchased by the Museum for exhibition. The Chinese sculpture in wood was purchased this year and is now in the Chinese gallery.
Research plans for the Museum grow out of discussions between the Director, the Associate Director, and the Curators. They are then passed on to the Expedition Committee of the Board of Managers and finally to the Board as a whole for final decision. In 1952 three members of the Expedition Committee and their wives, with the Director, made an on-the-spot survey of archaeology in the Middle East visiting our own excavations in Cyprus, Turkey, and Iraq as well as those of the British in Iraq. One of the Museum’s excavations in Cyprus at the neolithic village of Sotira was directed by Porphyrios Dikios. Here he is pointing out with his cane the curious structure of a stone house to Mr. and Mrs. Percy C. Madeira, Jr., Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Eckert, and Mr. and Mrs. Brandon Barringer. This is Khirokitia near the south coast of Cyprus in 1952.
Today there are no standards for good museum exhibition technique. We are all experimenting. A dilemma in the University Museum is created by a desire to utilize objects for educational purposes and at the same time to exhibit them as works of art. But this is not unnatural since the institution is, at once, a public museum of ancient and primitive art, a museum for the instruction of University students, and a center for research. The Hall of Man is on the educational side and directed toward children. adults, and University students alike: Carleton Coon wrote the script for this story but many had a hand in the graphic illustrations. Alfred Bendiner did the opening cartoon and we are glad to say that no one seriously objects to a comic touch in the history of man.
Image Number: 55831
Eckley B. Cox was a Philadelphian with a life-long interest in Egypt. He supported many years of excavation, particularly in Nubia and at Memphis, Denderah, Thebes and Meydum in Egypt proper. The great stone pillars above are from the city of Memphis and a building dating from the thirteenth century B. C. The construction of the entire Egyptian wing, its present maintenance, and our current Egyptian research has been financed by Mr. Cox.
The Gallery of Native Pacific Art is a compromise between the old and the new in exhibition technique. Old cases have had their faces lifted and the whole gallery has been remodeled with light and color. The Museum is famous for its vast collection of Native Pacific and African Art, only a minute part of which is on exhibition. Much of it is stored for study and on loan to other museums in the United States.
Museums all over America are currently undergoing some rather startling changes. One innovation is the use of Museums for all kinds of social and educational activities, usually arranged for or by members of the Museum. In May of this year, University Museum members and friends played a “WHAT IN THE WORLD” game attempting to identify some very strange and weird objects from all over the world. Those with the highest scores for identification then made up a panel of experts for a mock performance of the Museum’s television show before the assembled players. Members and guests attempt to identify the carving of a bird’s head-and it is clearly heavy going for some of them. One problem in the game was to locate the country of origin of the costumes worn by five students from the Department of Anthropology.
From left to right they are Mrs. Burton Caine (Plains Indian ), Mrs. Edward Carter III (Chinese), Mr. Harry Payne Whitney III (Arab), Miss Mary Louise Morton (Guatemalan), Mr. Sterling Lanier (Afghan).
The panel of experts chosen after the game were Miss Luise Rainer, Mrs. Robert McLean, Mr. Michael Steward, and Mr. Emanuel M. Staub. Alfred Kidder II, one of the regular members of the Museum’s television program, set the pace. Miss Rainer here struggles with a ghost mask from New Ireland. The audience is clearly absorbed with the efforts of the experts, fully appreciating their difficulties after their own attempts earlier in the evening.
Members of the Museum staff are always most critical of their colleagues on the television screen. At left, Frances Eyman and Genevieve Van Bever watch a performance of WHAT IN THE WORLD on the Philco television machine contributed by that Company to the Museum’s Hall of Man. In the background is Alfred Bendiner’s cartoon synopsis of Carl Coon’s Story of Man.
WHAT IN THE WORLD, the Museum’s television program, is now in its fourth year on the Columbia Broadcasting System network. Each week it takes the University Museum to an estimated three million people. One of the first successful educational programs on television, it won the Peabody Prize in 1952 and now continues on a sustaining basis financed by CBS. At present it is broadcast from Philadelphia and New York at 2:00 each Saturday afternoon. It appears in Los Angeles direct, but on others of the thirty stations which carry it, it may appear as a kinescope at any time during the week. Carl Coon (left above) is what the amusement trade calls our “heavy” in the lingo of the magazine VARIETY, in which the program has been reviewed. The term means that Coon is humorous, gruff, and an objector. In the center is Jacques Lipchitz, the famed sculptor, who has a phenomenal knowledge of ancient and primitive sculpture and who is uncanny at identifying objects from any time and any place. The third member of this panel of experts on one of our WHAT IN THE WORLD shows is René d’Harnoncourt, Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art.
Although the idea for WHAT IN THE WORLD came from the Museum, it was never a successful production until Robert Forrest of WCAU gave it the professional touch and its dramatic setting. Upper left is studio 2 of WCAU television, the Bulletin station on City LinE, Philadelphia, from which the program is broadcast and also cabled to New York each week for distribution throughout the country.
The Department of Fine Arts in the University, in collaboration with the Museum, has now installed a studio, offices, and a life class amphitheatre in the Northwest Coast Art galleries of the Museum. The whole Museum is, of course, a studio for art students both from the University and from the city’s art schools such as the Museum School on Broad Street.
Our experiment of utilizing Museum galleries for studios, University classes (above), and public meetings of all kinds is successful and does not interfere with the casual visitor who wanders in while a class or meeting is in session. They are only startled to see a Museum so much alive. This is part of a prevailing philosophy to consider Museums as centers of intellectual amd artistic activity, not static storerooms of antiquities and art objects. All of the professional members of the Museum are members of the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. Courses in archaeology or anthropology usually are taught in the Museum. There are two regular classrooms, but recently, with more classes being taught by the staff in the Museum, we have installed a seminar table and chairs in one of the public galleries. This group of students is meeting in class in the Northwest Coast Art gallery adjoining the Fine Arts studio.
The superintendent of the building, Charles Wiley, and his crew of maintenance men arc jacks-of-all-trades. The illustration below, made in 1954, shows their first attempt to lift a stone sculpture of this size and weight without professional riggers. The Chinese figure, weighing several tons, was installed in the rotunda without mishap.
The Museum has recently established a working relationship with three banks in Philadelphia. The Fidelity-Philadelphia Bank has a continuing and changing exhibition of University Museum collections in its main lobby. The Western Savings Fund Society has just recently installed this temporary exhibition of ancient Babylonian tablets in connection with the Fiftieth Anniversary of the University of Pennsylvania Evening School of Accounts and Finance and, now, the Liberty Real Estate Bank and Trust exhibits, each week. the collection of objects identified on the Museum’s weekly WHAT IN THE WORLD television program. Like television, this sort of thing expands the facilities of the Museum to a much broader general public than would be possible in the Museum itself. It is part of the growing popular interest in ancient and primitive art.
There is a simple truth about human affairs that most of us in Museums are just now discovering. Everyone enjoys participation more than passive observation. Children below the age of adolescence are some of our best supporters, but they are most enthusiastic when they are on their own in the Museum and doing something about it. These youngsters are playing our identification game arranged by the Education Department and the whole Museum is their playground. Some of them eventually become junior guides. We suspect that in this game they learn more about the collections as a whole than many members of the staff.
Working in close cooperation with Philadelphia’s Board of Education the Museum’s Education Department instructs some 20,000 children from public and private schools each year. With this number there is no way of avoiding large groups and the usual lecture-tour of the Museum. But with that introduction those whose imagination is fired often return alone or with their parents to become more a part of the Museum’s activities. The Summer Work-Shop is one of our most successful experiments with children’s participation in the Museum.
Light in the crystal ball of a Chinese Empress brings joy to these small fry and Reuben Goldberg, our Museum photographer, was lucky enough to fix it for all time in this photo. Behind these small girls are little clay ladies from a Chinese tomb of the T’ang dynasty.
Each Saturday morning during the winter there is some special function for the children-a film. a game, or a live performance such as this by Tom Two Arrows, who performs his own native dances. We feel sure this illustration will be appreciated by all of those harrassed young fathers who have been responsible for a batch of junior scouts on Saturday mornings. We at the Museum sometimes feel swamped by shoals of youngsters, particularly on Saturdays, but their enthusiasm makes it worth all the trouble.
Reproductions of objects in the Museum collections are made in the Museum’s own shop. This has become a world-wide mail order business which is supplying absolutely accurate copies of ancient and primitive art objects for schools, museums, private homes and collectors. Recently the Axel Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropology purchased for the Museum the casting business of Damon and Company, England. With this we are now the world center for the production of casts of fossil human bones. It may come as some surprise to the Museum’s friends to learn that there is a very considerable business in the sale of such casts to Universities and other institutions around the world. Reproductions, books, pamphlets, pictures and color slides arc sold by Miss Indira Nalin in the central lobby of the Museum just as you enter the Brazilian Coffee Shop. It is the African sculpture shown in the background which has the widest sale at the present time
To many of the University of Pennsylrnnia students, the most successful recent innovation at the Museum is the Brazilian Coffee Shop. This is actually the gallery of Brazilian ethnography directly behind the Sales Desk in the main lobby. It will seat forty persons and is often overcrowded. Professors and students, after a class in the Museum, meet here for a cup of coffee specially blended for the Museum by Pierce and Company.
One of the most dramatic discoveries in archaeology during our generation was made by atomic physicists and chemists. This is a method of measuring radio-active Carbon 14 in organic materials from ancient archaeological sites to determine the age of those sites. Charcoal, wood, burned bone, ivory and various fibers found in excavations arc now processed in the University Museum’s C-14 laboratory, established by the Department of Physics to give us an absolute date on ruins or cultures which we unearth. Beth Ralph, Eric Parkinson and Barbara Roberts are carrying out a radio-active C-14 analysis. On the right is the chemical process-purifying a sample. On the left is the elaborate geiger counter and recording apparatus. The Museum is concentrating on two specific regions of the world, the Near East and the Arctic. Eventually we should be able to establish an absolute chronology extending backwards in time, in these two regions, from the present to some thirty thousand years ago. Other laboratories in the U111ited States and abroad will be establishing similar chronologies in other areas of the world.
Delays afflicting our laboratory have been caused by contamination from atomic bomb explosions in the Pacific. Radio-active debris in the atmosphere is picked up by the sensitive apparatus in the Museum’s laboratory. This gives a false reading and a false date for the material being tested.
Those people with a thoroughgoing knowledge of ancient and primitive art almost always, at some time or other, show up in the University Museum. The sculptor, Jacques Lipchitz is not only one of our regular television experts, but also an advisor on exhibitions. He has recently been trying to work out a temporary exhibition, illustrating a theory of his about recurrent cycles in art history. Unfortunately, we have not yet been able to finance that exhibition. We still hope to. Here Lipchitz examines one of those very ancient painted pots from Iran.
Charles Addams, of New Yorker fame, meets some ghostly characters from Africa
Franklin Watkins, the painter, is digging into our collection of Mayan and Mexican objects.
Rene d’Harnoncourt of the the Museum of Modern Art examines a wood sculpture from the South Pacific.
The Museum auditorium is used by many thousands of people each year for all kinds of private and public meetings. These meetings range from Civil Defense discussions under the auspices of the Army through meetings of the World Affairs Council, and such things as Schoolmen’s Week and medical meetings, to the Azerbaijan Society. Perhaps the most boisterous meeting in the Museum is that of the high-school students from the community of Philadelphia when they meet each year as a replica of the United Nations. Several different groups, like this one in the auditorium, meet in the galleries all over the Museum to argue current political and international problems.
There is an inexhaustible source for good design among the hundreds of thousands of ancient and primitive objects in the University Museum vaults. One example of the use of these designs is the whole series of texitiles now sold widely throughout the United States which are based upon University Museum designs. This is the University Museum’s series by Stapler. Another use of many motifs is in current advertising copy. These things could be much more widely utilized by firms in the Philadelphia area.
Saturday morning at the Museum is for children-games or performances in the auditorium; Saturday and Sunday afternoons for the adults. Last year nearly 4,000 people attended the 18 concerts on Saturday afternoon and more than 13,000 attended the showing of documentary films and live performances on Sunday afternoons.
Miss Bhanumathe Menon Rao is doing a Hindu dance in person before one of the Sunday audiences.
Two Chesterfield Inlet Eskimo grandmothers, just after the birth of a new baby, count the number of their grandchildren on their fingers. These very dirty, but exceedingly attractive people, have often been subjects of documentary films such as Flaherty’s “Eskimo” and always charm an audience. This is from a film recently shown at the University Museum which was produced by the Canadian Government’s National Film Board.
Philadelphia’s University Museum was designed at the end of the 19th Century in the style of Renaissance buildings of northern Italy. Today, in an age of severe and utilitarian public buildings, many people consider it a difficult building to use for modem exhibitions of ancient and primitive art. To the exhibition designer, at the present moment, this may be a serious problem. But, to those of us who are students of history there is a certain satisfaction in carrying on the study of man in the kind of building originally designed for an age of inquiry, discovery, and intellectual adventure. It is not surprising that those people of the last century who established the tradition of the Museum should also choose Renaissance architecture. Less preoccupied with security, welfare, social change, and fear. 19th Century Americans probably lived more in the spirit of the Renaissance than we do today. In spite of the changes which we now make in the nature of the Museum, we hope that many of the traditions of that lustier age can be maintained. We here are not preoccupied with contemporary social, political, or economic problems, but with inquiry into the nature of man and the world in which he has always lived. In this kind of inquiry, perhaps, lies the surest road to intellectual freedom and to the bridge of learning from one generation to the next.
Cite This Article
Rainey, Froelich. "Tradition and Change." Museum Bulletin XVIII, no. 4 (November, 1954): 5-51. Accessed July 01, 2024. https://www.penn.museum/sites/bulletin/3898/
This digitized article is presented here as a historical reference and may not reflect the current views of the Penn Museum.
