Although these new students have no doubt been busy this semester, they kindly took the time to tell us a little bit about themselves and their interest in the ancient world. Welcome, Gabriel, Julian, and Volkan—we’re glad to have you here!
Gabriel Key graduated from Swarthmore College with a BA in Greek and minors in Latin and religion. While attending Swarthmore College, they were a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. Gabriel cemented their passion for archaeology in 2017 while studying abroad at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome. They completed the Bridge MA Program in Classical Studies at the University of Michigan in the spring of 2023.
Gabriel has been involved in fieldwork in both Greece and Italy. They participated in the Azoria Project on Crete (2017) and have spent four seasons working with the Gabii Project (2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023)—two as a volunteer and two as a staff member in the Environmental Lab. Gabriel’s research interests are centered around early Central Italy, particularly on identity formation, food, archaeobotany, and zooarchaeology.
How did you get interested in studying the ancient world?
I got interested in studying the ancient world when I was five years old. In kindergarten, we learned about the Greek gods, and I was so enthused that I came home to tell my mother I was converting to the Greek pantheon.
What is your favorite thing about studying the ancient world?
My favorite thing about studying the ancient world is learning about the lives people led long ago, particularly those of the non-elite and marginalized who are not represented in grand histories and monuments.
What are your career aspirations?
Before graduate school, I spent two years teaching middle school Latin and enjoyed the experience of showing others what I find fascinating about the ancient world and helping students learn how to think critically. After I finish my PhD, I hope to become a professor and have the opportunity to engage with an older audience in this way.
Who is your favorite person from history?
I don’t think I could choose one favorite person from history—there are far too many to choose from, and each with their own stories!
Julian Thibeau received a BA in Near Eastern studies from the University of Michigan in 2017 and an MA in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Chicago in 2020. Their MA thesis dealt with the landscape of crocodile cults in the Graeco-Roman Egyptian Fayum Oasis. They participated in the University of Chicago excavation of Horvat Duvshan in Israel in 2019. Julian worked for three years at the University of Chicago’s Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes on projects using geographic information systems (GIS) to document archaeological sites in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also spent two years performing cultural resource management archaeology surveys in the United States.
Julian is a member of the Northeast Fayyūm Lakeshore Project. In 2023, they took part in the excavation of the site of Karanis in the Egyptian Fayum and carried out a field survey of Graeco-Roman canals. Julian’s research focuses on human interaction with the landscape in Egypt during the Graeco-Roman period. They have presented papers on irrigation systems and trade routes in the Egyptian Western Desert and its oases. In addition, they founded a local chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt—ARCE Detroit—in 2023 and served as its first president.
How did you get interested in studying the ancient world?
I first became interested in studying the ancient world through my childhood love of ancient Egypt. I rediscovered my passion for studying the ancient world as an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan through classes taken in the Department of Middle East Studies.
What is your favorite thing about studying the ancient world?
My favorite thing about studying the ancient world is the moments when I feel close to people who lived in the past. The feeling of standing inside a home that someone inhabited in antiquity is an incomparable experience.
What is something you think everyone should know about the ancient world?
I think everyone should recognize the humanity we share with people who lived and died in the ancient world.
What are your career aspirations?
I aspire to work in academia. I would love to be able to split my time between teaching students and carrying out fieldwork. I would also enjoy working in a museum.
Who’is your favorite person from history?
My favorite person from history is Lou Sullivan, a pioneering activist for trans rights who inspires me.
Volkan Topal received his bachelor of architecture and MA in history of architecture at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. His MA thesis essentially focused on assessing the role of the architectural language of the imperial cult and imagery in the transformation of the urban spaces in Roman Ephesus, which employed a kinesthetic method that incorporates the dynamics of space and movement.
Volkan has participated in several archaeological projects in Turkey—in Ephesus, Teos, Lagina Hecate Sanctuary, Ayasuluk, and Notion. He is interested in cultural encounters, landscape, and urban studies, as well as the dynamic relationship between identity and the built environment.
How did you get interested in studying the ancient world?
As a child of an archaeologist, I had the opportunity to visit numerous sites, mostly in the southern section of Central Anatolia and the Central Taurus Mountains, starting from a very young age. Those journeys were before any formal education and training, so they were only casual, personal experiences of things, objects, and places of the past. Such interactions had a significant impact on me, endowing me with a firm interest in the field and forming a monumental background for my future works.
What is your favorite thing about studying the ancient world?
Studying the ancient world is a fulfilling thing in general, but I think one of the most important things for me is that the ancient world seems to be always relevant to our time, or people make it relevant for various reasons to our current discussions.
What is something you think everyone should know about the ancient world?
I think that they should know that our reception of the ancient world can be very personal and there are multiple possibilities for us to conceptualize the ancient world.
What are your career aspirations?
I would like to carry on my studies and hopefully find a place for myself in academia.
Who is your favorite person from history?
I do not have one particular favorite person from history, but those who expressed their very honest opinions with graffiti in many places, whose voices could otherwise not have been heard, are the people that I am very interested in.
By Emily Allison, with Janet Richards, Scott Meier, and Eric Campbell
BIG Object Spotlight #1 can be viewed on the second floor of the Kelsey Museum until late October.
If you have spent any time around the Kelsey Museum in the past several years, you may have heard whispers of the acronym “BIG.” Standing for “Byzantine and Islamic Gallery,” BIG refers to the new, permanent gallery that Kelsey curators and staff are hard at work developing. Although the opening of this gallery is still a few years away, a series of “Object Spotlights”—available over the coming months—will allow visitors to receive a small sampling of the artifacts and themes that are yet to come. The first of these Object Spotlights was installed in late June and will be up through the end of October, around which point a new group of artifacts will be available to view.
To learn more about progress on BIG (and more specifically, the development of BIG Object Spotlight #1), I spoke with Janet Richards, Scott Meier, and Eric Campbell—each of whom played key roles in making the opening of the first Object Spotlight a success.
Janet Richards, our first interviewee, was the lead curator for BIG Object Spotlight #1. She also serves as the Kelsey Museum’s curator for Dynastic Egypt and a professor of Egyptology in U-M’s Department of Middle East Studies.
Emily: To start, can you talk about the Byzantine and Islamic Gallery? Those who are intimately involved with the Kelsey Museum have been aware of the gallery’s ongoing development for quite some time, but how would you describe the gallery and its goals to an external audience?
Janet: In this new permanent Byzantine and Islamic Gallery (BIG), we’ll showcase the Kelsey’s Byzantine and Islamic collections of art and material culture, as well as artifacts relating to early Judaism. We’re lucky to have substantial support from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts for this work. This gallery—initial planning for which has been overseen by a Kelsey curatorial team with input from Paroma Chatterjee, our History of Art colleague who served as a visiting curator in 2020–2021, and an advisory committee of experts in and beyond the University—will fill a critical gap both geographically and chronologically in our new-wing displays. The project gives us the opportunity not only to consider artistic and archaeological remains of the medieval world in western Asia, the Mediterranean, and northeast Africa but also to highlight how this evidence for the human past resonates with the concerns and lifeways of our modern world.
We’re committed to avoiding traditional boundaries and instead exploring the long-term cultural and intellectual interrelationships of these different regions and cultures, through themes such as travel, piety, soundscapes, animals and humans, and the expression of status and identity through material culture. And we can bring to the mix a strong sense of context, thanks to Kelsey excavations at numerous sites relevant to this installation. We want to give our visitors a sense of real people and their commodities sharing and moving between lived landscapes and intercultural dialogues, all materialized through a wide array of media—coins, textiles, visual productions, glassware, domestic productions, architecture, and spaces.
Emily: What is your role in the development of BIG, and more specifically, in the development of BIG Object Spotlight #1?
Janet: I’m one of the Kelsey faculty curators; my own work is in the Middle East, specifically on the Egyptian Nile Valley of much earlier periods. For 2022–2023, I was acting project manager and lead curator for the Byzantine and Islamic Gallery project. Exhibitions, especially permanent galleries, are a multiyear process; so with the curatorial team and Scott Meier (the Kelsey’s exhibits preparator), I developed the idea of a series of BIG Object Spotlight installations to give Kelsey visitors insight into the process as it unfolds. In this way, we can give visitors and students access to key artifacts and themes to watch for in the eventual permanent gallery.
Even a comparatively compact installation like this requires the collaboration of a village! We owe BIG Object Spotlight #1 to the efforts of Kelsey professional staff: Scott Meier, Eric Campbell (graphic designer), Emily Allison (editor), Michelle Fontentot (collections manager), Carrie Roberts and Suzanne Davis (conservators), and Tamika Mohr (chief administrator). The curatorial team included Nicola Barham, Terry Wilfong, and myself; curatorial assistant and IPAMAA graduate student James Nesbitt-Prosser (who sole-authored the in-depth content on the in-gallery monitor); and our new visiting curator Christy Gruber of the U-M History of Art Department, who generously shared her expertise even though she was on sabbatical. Our wonderful Kelsey docents, in a session I had with them and Stephanie Wottreng Haley (community and youth educator), came up with the idea of the colorful map you’ll see throughout the exhibition!
Emily: Can you walk us through some of the artifacts featured in BIG Object Spotlight #1? Why were they chosen? What do they tell us about the ancient and medieval Byzantine and Islamic world?
Janet: This installation highlights three different categories of artifacts in our collections, three different media, three geographic areas of the ancient and medieval Middle East, and an assortment of our key themes.
Two ceramic pilgrimage flasks (visible at left; KM 88209 and KM 30043), one from Egypt and one from Iraq, are a type of object produced from the 1st century BC and then manufactured in the thousands from the 5th to 7th century AD at pilgrimage sites. Such flasks were either carried by individual pilgrims, circulated among church and secular elites, or simply traded internationally as exotic commodities.
Two inscribed cotton textiles (known as tirāz) are from Yemen and Egypt. They show the visitor two styles of this type of textile: one bears a Kufic (Arabic) inscription reading, “Dominion belongs to Him [God]. Blessing to its owner.” The other is decorated with a colorful motif of rabbits. Such textiles were typically given as gifts to members of a ruler’s court as a marker of social status, but they also had religious significance—in Egypt, tirāz textiles were often used in burial rituals.
Finally, a carved wooden door lintel (see below), dating to the 12th century AD and probably from Cairo, Egypt, is an example of the long history of inscribing prayers on door lintels, a practice that bridges pagan, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. These materialized prayers, occurring in domestic as well as sacred contexts, not only provided blessings to people passing beneath them but also served the magical purpose of warding off evil. This panel reads, “A perfect blessing, all-inclusive grace, and lasting felicity.”
Inscribed door lintel (KM 10201).
Emily: What challenges did you face in the development of this initial Spotlight case?
Janet: Choosing colors for the BIG Spotlight space on the second floor of the Kelsey’s new wing. We went into this thinking about deep red, gold, and green—powerful colors of the period across the Middle East. After first trying red on the walls, we did a pivot to trying different (many different!) shades of green, drawing inspiration from a manuscript image Christy Gruber sent us. I’m sure Scott Meier will describe how many different small pots of paint he tried! Christy points out that the final shade used looks like cyprus, appropriate for the geographic emphasis of the gallery.
Other challenges included working out effective content for the introductory and in-gallery monitors (check out Eric’s gorgeous accompanying visuals!) and strategically situating the textiles case in a lower-light area.
In addition, scheduling such an installation is always a process of negotiation with the museum’s different departments to slot in work on this project amid everything else going on at the Kelsey. Scheduling also specifically comes into play for the textiles in particular, the conservation requirements around which are that they cannot be on display for more than four months. So that actually helped us decide on how frequently the BIG Object Spotlight installations will rotate: every fourth months for the next year or so, until we begin the construction phases of the permanent gallery project.
Emily: What are some challenges you foresee in the development of the permanent BIG?
Janet: Scheduling and conservation concerns, as with any exhibition. Cost is always a factor too—not only for expenses related to the installation but also for programming around the project and the gallery. We are fortunate to have the substantial support of LSA for the gallery itself but will be undertaking advancement activities for these related things.
We’ll need to focus intensively in the coming year on nailing down the overall object list (taking into account conservation limits on display of organic objects) and developing the themes and narratives and look of the gallery.
Emily: What other artifacts or themes can we look forward to in subsequent Object Spotlights?
Janet: Each of these will be lead-curated by different people and poll different audiences for ideas about the kinds of objects to display. Next up is Christy Gruber, who is already advanced in her planning for Object Spotlight #2, which will open sometime in November!
As Janet pointed out, the creation of any exhibition—even one with a handful of artifacts like this one—takes a village. Next up is Scott Meier, the Kelsey Museum’s exhibition coordinator, who oversaw the development of the physical space in which the Object Spotlight resides.
Emily: What is your role in the development of BIG and the first Object Spotlight?
Scott: I was responsible for the design and fabrication of the physical space of the gallery. One of the driving forces was to give the visitor a sense of what is still to come once the actual gallery is built. As we continue the Object Spotlight gallery, I would like to see it grow into more of an informational hub for the visitor to not only learn what is happening with BIG but also provide feedback for us about different design ideas.
Emily: Can you talk about the redesign of the Kelsey Museum’s second-floor galleries?
Scott: We are at the very early stages of the redesign, but one of the things we would like to do is create a more open feeling to the galleries so that there is an interplay between them, both in content and visually. We want to convey the message that there was crossover in relationships and time periods.
We are also looking to use color a bit more than in other previous galleries to convey the various cultures. It is still early, but this may provide an opportunity to introduce totally new graphic branding for the permanent galleries.
Emily: What considerations did you keep in mind while prepping the space for the installation of BIG Object Spotlight #1? What challenges did you face?
Scott: The biggest consideration that had to be dealt with was lighting. The two textiles (see below) require low light—five footcandles—so to achieve this without making the gallery look underlit, I had to lower all the light that led up to or was around the textile cases so that the visitors’ eyes could adjust by the time they reach the textile cases.
The biggest obstacle I faced was getting the correct color palette. Because color is going to play a vital role in the new gallery, I wanted to be sure what was represented was accurate as well as palatable to the visitor. What looks good as a small sample doesn’t always read well as a painted wall. It took about 18 samples painted on the wall and three complete gallery paintings until we were happy.
Tirāz textile fragment with inscription (KM 22621).Textile fragment with rabbits motif (KM 22642).
Emily: What are some goals you have for the physical final product of the Byzantine and Islamic Gallery? How will it differ from, or be similar to, the Kelsey’s existing gallery spaces?
Scott: As I mentioned before, we hope to have more interconnected galleries in the future. In terms of design, it is still early, but due to earlier conversations the Exhibition Committee had, I think we are going to walk a fine line between having the gallery reflect the culture via color and graphics without crossing over into trying to be an overly immersive experience.
I would like to make the actual case design and case layout very similar to what we already have so the transition is seamless. However, there are numerous opportunities to update the look to reflect the new gallery. One of these opportunities is addressing potential lighting issues with the artifacts. I am exploring drawers that have motion-sensor lighting that goes on when the drawer is pulled out. If we find this does work, I hope we can take this technology to our existing drawers that are difficult to view because of low light.
I am also hoping we can introduce more interactive exhibits to the new Byzantine and Islamic Gallery with an eye toward adding interactive opportunities in the other permanent galleries.
Finally, I turned my questioning to Eric Campbell. As the Kelsey Museum’s graphic designer, Eric also played a major role in the visual final product of BIG Object Spotlight #1.
Emily: Can you describe your role in the development of Object Spotlight #1 and BIG more generally?
Eric: I am responsible for designing the overall look of the gallery (along with Scott), as well as creating the panels, videos, signage, and miscellaneous collateral.
Emily: What are some challenges you faced while working on the BIG Object Spotlight #1 materials (if any)? Are there any challenges you foresee in the development of future Spotlight cases and, ultimately, the permanent Byzantine and Islamic Gallery?
Eric: Working on the BIG Object Spotlight was not particularly challenging, although the delicate nature of some of the objects—textiles specifically—make displaying them difficult. For future spotlights, and the permanent BIG, we will have to get creative with how we present these objects.
Emily: Do you have any goals for the visual final product of BIG?
Eric: In designing the visual look of the BIG, I hope to push past the subdued museum design that is commonplace. I want to incorporate colors, patterns, and textures from the Byzantine and Islamic world to bring drama to the gallery.
If you have not had a chance to see the first Object Spotlight in person, there are still a few weeks yet left to visit before its deinstallation. And of course, the second Object Spotlight, curated by Christy Gruber, will be up before too long, allowing visitors to view a new thematic grouping of artifacts.
Thank you to Janet, Scott, and Eric for taking the time to discuss BIG and Object Spotlight #1 in detail—we look forward to seeing more in the coming months and years!
Kelsey Museum artifacts relating to the Byzantine and Islamic worlds.
A bone bonanza! Bailey with faunal finds from the Tharros Archaeological Project.
I spent the month of June in Sardinia, Italy, at the Tharros Archaeological Project run by the University of Cincinnati. Tharros was a Punic and Roman city inhabited from the 8th century BCE to the 4th century CE.
I spent most of my time at Tharros in our finds lab in the nearby town of Cabras. I was responsible for washing, processing, and recording all of the project’s faunal material for the first time since it began in 2019. Our goal for the season was to begin to understand some of the patterns of animal use visible in the excavated material and to identify which contexts were worth coming back to for a closer look in later years.
This year, the field team excavated an 18-meter trench within a Roman house from the 3rd century CE, as well as two trenches in the temple area of Tharros. I enjoyed working with colleagues from Cincinnati, Stanford University, and Brown University. Finding equid and deer bones in areas all over Tharros was very exciting, but my favorite finds were hedgehog mandibles.
I could not have accomplished any of the work I’ve done at Tharros or elsewhere without the support of the Kelsey Museum and, in particular, Dr. Richard Redding, whom I miss very much.
One of the hedgehog mandibles excavated at Tharros.Processing the Tharros finds.
Hello, Kelsey Blog readers! Please join us in welcoming Taylor Tyrell and Lily Zamora to the Kelsey Museum. These students have joined us for the summer of 2023 and will be working on a variety of tasks to support the projects and operations of the Education and Administrative Departments.
Taylor Tyrell (she/her) completed the Bridge MA Program in Classical Studies in 2021 and recently finished her second year as a doctoral student in the Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History. Her academic interests focus on gender and sexuality in the Roman Empire as well as reception studies, particularly queer reception of antiquity. She is also interested in the digital humanities—an interest that was sparked by an opportunity she had as an undergraduate to help create a virtual reality site of the Asklepion at Epidaurus, Greece.
This summer, Taylor will assist the Education Department with its DiSKO (Digital Study of Kelsey Objects) project, which intends to make Kelsey artifacts available online in an effort to increase their accessibility to professors and students. To that end, she will help create 2-D and 3-D imaging of objects using photogrammetry and lidar, edit and prepare completed scans, conduct research for the information that will accompany each object, and develop lesson plans with which professors can teach using groupings of objects. She hopes that, by the end of summer, she will be close to having an initial assemblage of items ready to be published online in the fall.
When asked what she most looks forward to working on this summer, Taylor noted that she was excited to use the Kelsey Museum’s new lidar scanner (previously, the Education Department had been using an application on an iPad to conduct this scanning). “It is incredible how affordable that technology can be,” Taylor commented. “I think that the Kelsey will be able to get a lot of use out of it outside of this project.”
Lily Zamora (she/her) will work as an intern in the Administrative Department over the summer and beyond. As the administrative assistant, she will focus on various admin-related projects such as supporting and revamping the Kelsey social media pages, event planning, file management, and other tasks as needed to assist the work of the chief administrator and other staff members at the museum.
An undergraduate studying media and communications, Lily recently transferred to the University of Michigan from Saginaw Valley State University (SVSU). Previously, she served as the marketing and communications assistant at U-M’s Center for Cell Plasticity and Organ Design, as well as the student grant assistant in the Center for Rural Behavioral Health and Addiction Studies at SVSU.
Lily enjoys engaging in technical writing with the goals of improving user experience and making information understandable for all. She is also interested in designing elements such as newsletters, flyers, and social media posts. In her administrative position at the Kelsey, Lily hopes to improve her skills relating to editing, social media coordination, and information design. She is very excited to help show off everything the Kelsey has to offer!
Hello, friends of the Kelsey Blog! The past six months have really flown by, haven’t they? Suzanne and I have spent quite a bit of this time traveling for work, something that we both missed during the pandemic. Here are some highlights!
In September and October, Suzanne and I returned to Abydos, Egypt, where we provide conservation for the Abydos Middle Cemetery (AMC) Project. We worked on a variety of things, including objects from the serdab of Weni the Elder, as well as newly excavated artifacts, alongside our Egyptian conservator colleagues Hamada Sadek and Ahmed Abdullah. Being back there—and being a part of the Weni project—was such a thrill.
AMC dig house at Abydos, Egypt
In November, Suzanne and I gave papers at the American Society of Overseas Research’s annual meeting in Boston, where Suzanne presented her research on gender equity in museums and I participated in a workshop on Roman-Egyptian funerary portraits. It was great to see colleagues in the flesh once again after many years of virtual meetings and to be able to visit some old stomping grounds, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where I took in the newly reinstalled Greek and Roman galleries. Check out this truly inspired loom weight display (I love it so much I just had to share it with you folks)! We also enjoyed a tour of the Harvard Art Museums with recent IPCAA graduate Caitlin Clerkin, who works there as a postdoctoral fellow.
Ceramic loom weights, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Acc. #s 84.381, 84.373, 84.374, 84.370; Greek East, 6th–4th centuries BCE, from Assos (Behramkale, Turkey)
In January, Suzanne traveled to Jebel Barkal, Sudan, where she is directing site preservation with her team of conservators and conservation architects including Elmontaser Dafalla, David Flory, and Sefian Mutwakil. Check out her blog post and more news from Barkal here.
As always, there is a lot going on in the Conservation Lab! Keep tuning in.
Back in January, many Kelsey Museum faculty and staff and IPCAA students traveled to New Orleans for the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. We caught up with Anwar Mahjoub, from El-Kurru, Sudan, who visited the United States for the first time to present his work with the El-Kurru Community Heritage Center, which he and Kelsey Research Scientist Dr. Geoff Emberling have been developing since 2016. After the conference, Anwar visited Ann Arbor and the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.
How was your journey to the United States? What did it feel like to be here after so many years working with the University of Michigan?
It was a wonderful journey. The team I’ve been working with for a long time is from the University of Michigan, so I’ve heard about the Kelsey Museum and watched online lectures from that place. These helped me to imagine what the Museum would be like, but then I saw it in reality, and it was entirely different. I enjoyed my time visiting the Kelsey galleries and the bioarchaeology lab. It’s also interesting for me to see animal bones which were taken from Jebel Barkal [a U of M excavation in Sudan close to El-Kurru] to be sorted and identified in the laboratory.
Do you have a favorite object in the galleries?
Definitely the painted sarcophagus [of Djehutymose]! It’s interesting for me because I’ve been learning Egyptian hieroglyphs, and I was able to read some of the texts painted on the inside of the coffin.
Anwar at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA). Photo by Bailey Franzoi.
How was the experience of presenting at the AIA? How was New Orleans?
I presented in August at the International Conference for Nubian Studies in Warsaw, which was my first time traveling outside Sudan. There, the focus was on Nubian archaeology, but AIA was focused on Roman and Greek archaeology, which I don’t know much about, but enjoyed hearing and learning. I was glad to be in the first session and representing my community [of El-Kurru].
New Orleans was very interesting. Part of it feels like a busy city with modern skyscrapers, but the other part was lively, with people partying and playing drums and cheering! There was a spirit of fun, and it felt like more of a friendly place than anywhere else I’ve visited in Europe or the US. Our Uber driver was even telling us stories about his family in Chad. I also really liked the food—jambalaya felt like a familiar dish from home.
For those who didn’t attend your paper, could you give a brief summary of it?
I co-presented a paper titled “Decolonizing Archaeological Practice at Kushite Sites in Sudan.” Basically, the main point was that local communities ought to be full participants in archaeological projects in almost all stages of the project. Not only should archaeological projects hire local workers at a fair wage, but they should also include the local community in the discussion of what they want to know and learn about the archaeological site. The local community members need to be able to draw their own conclusions, not just academics who have perspectives based on readings of scholarly texts. Communities should also be able to benefit financially from archaeology. For example, in our case, the El-Kurru Community Heritage Center’s revenues will go back to the community in order to best serve it and help out in emergencies. This is all based on the experiences my community and I had working with the International El-Kurru Archaeological Project starting in 2013.
Anwar and Bailey Franzoi co-presenting at AIA. Photo by Kelsey Affiliate Faculty David Stone.
Thank you so much, Anwar, and we hope to see you back in Michigan soon!
The results are in! It was a tight race, but 30 percent of voters chose “Bread” (but not really) as 2022’s Ugliest (and most beloved by our readers) Object.
These artifacts from Karanis, Egypt had everyone believing they were piles of bread until the mid-1990s when it was determined they were actually crushed pits and skins of olives. Re-visit this blog post for the whole story at https://myumi.ch/6Nex6.
Keep tuning in to the Kelsey Blog for more news and stories from the Kelsey Museum community.
Readers have until February 3, 2023 at midnight to make your decision and cast your vote. Votes will be tallied, and the lucky winner will be announced the week of February 6th.
Go on, click that link, and cast a vote for your favorite!
Hey, hey, Ugly fans! It’s the end of the year, which means it is time to celebrate with bubbly beverages and twinkling lights. What better way to wrap things up than with a light-bringing Ugly Object? This ceramic lamp came into the Kelsey collection in 1899, making it one of (if not the) first artifact to be acquired by the museum. Its object record indicates its origins to be somewhere in Asia Minor and that it was formerly part of a collection held by a Professor Rhoussopoulos from the University of Athens. The lamp was made in a two-part mold with the handle and nozzle attached separately, and the impressed figure on the discus is none other than Herakles, lion pelt and club in hand. This lamp makes me smile—the simple image of young Herk reminds me of 6th grade, when I was obsessed with Greek myths and committed D’Aulaire’s book on the subject to memory. I love that this object is frequently used in classes and gets students thinking about the ancient world in a direct, tangible way. And I love that it’s burned, like an oil lamp should be! It is a quintessential Ugly Object—ordinary, imperfect, and meaningful.
Ceramic lamp with image of Herakles at center, KM 792; Asia Minor, no date given; acquired in 1899 by Stuart.
Greetings Earthlings! We have another feature from our NEH-sponsored Color research project this month—another Isis Aphrodite! This time she has taken the form of a small-but-mighty polychrome figurine from Karanis. Our graduate assistant Laurel Fricker did some sleuthing and discovered that this may be an Isis Aphrodite Anasyromene, or Aphrodite lifting up her skirt. Hers isn’t exactly a skirt—more like a robe—and it is painted purple. Purple paint is a source of intrigue to scientists. You could produce it in a lot of different ways, by combining a variety of red, pink, blue, and black pigments. Sorting these mixtures out can present a challenge when investigating purple on artifacts. The purple on this Aphrodite is one of only two instances of this color we’ve found on a painted object from Karanis. It’s a mixture of rose madder and another unidentified pigment—we’re still working on figuring this out.
Having studied over 100 objects from Karanis and Terenouthis, it’s interesting that we’ve found such a small number of purple-painted pieces (only three total!). Not sure what this means yet, but stay tuned!
KM 6488, painted terracotta figurine of Isis Aphrodite; Roman Egyptian, 1st – 3rd century CE; discovered at Karanis in 1928
Ultraviolet-induced visible luminescence (UVL) image of the figurine showing orange-pink fluorescent madder pigment in the crown and robe.
