Fears about the looting of the Sudan National Museum were first raised in the early months of the civil war in Sudan. Now, two years later, the devastating news has been confirmed.
The Sudanese army recently recaptured the capital city of Khartoum, where the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) had been using the national museum as a military base. New videos show the aftermath of widespread looting, including broken and missing artifacts—both those on display and those in storage—and a heavily damaged building.
The Sudan National Museum was home to approximately 100,000 artifacts spanning millennia of Sudanese, African, and world history. Media outlets, including the Sudan Tribune, the Guardian, and others, have detailed the extent of the destruction and the responses from Sudanese officials and citizens. You can also read more on the Jebel Barkal Archaeological Project blog.
As the civil war in Sudan continues, the nation faces additional challenges due to seasonal flooding, which makes transporting critical supplies like food, water, and medicine difficult. “Sudan Road Access” is a new initiative on Zooniverse’s Planetary Response Network that aims to support humanitarian efforts in Sudan. In collaboration with the UN’s Logistics Cluster, this project seeks to map dry riverbeds—known as wadis—that flood during the rainy season and disrupt vital aid delivery routes.
Zooniverse is looking for volunteers to examine satellite images to identify and measure places where wadis cross over roads. This data will help predict and monitor flooding, ensuring that humanitarian organizations can navigate these areas more effectively and deliver aid where it is needed most.
Learn how you can get involved with the citizen science project here.
It has been more than a year since the civil war in Sudan started. As fighting continues between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces militia, millions of people have been displaced and face food and housing shortages, including our archaeological colleagues at Jebel Barkal and El-Kurru.
Please read the message below from Kelsey Museum Research Scientist Geoff Emberling to learn how you can support our colleagues and friends in Sudan.
Hello everyone,
It has been a while since we’ve posted on the Jebel Barkal blog. We’ve been busy and I’ll write more about what we’ve been doing in the coming weeks. But for now, I would like to ask for financial help for our colleagues in Sudan.
As you may know, the civil war in Sudan has continued for over a year now. About 8 million people have been displaced from their homes, mostly in the capital city of Khartoum and in Darfur, and many of those have moved to be closer to family in northern Sudan. One of our friends in El-Kurru village (near Barkal) wrote about this in another one of our project blogs, “Narrating Nubia” here. There is not enough work for these refugees, there is barely enough food and housing, and schools have been closed since the start of the war.
We are trying to help in many ways, but for now I’m asking for help for our archaeological colleagues, many of whom are struggling to have enough food to eat. We are hoping not only to support friends who are in a very difficult situation, but also to try to maintain some level of engagement and protection of Jebel Barkal. We can do some of this through project funding, but giving money directly to people in need is not possible with the grants we have.
My wife and I have just donated $3,000. If you have any ability to consider a donation, please contact me directly (geoff.emberling@gmail.com) and I will tell you how you can make a tax-deductible donation to our non-profit foundation. Many thanks.
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!
Caroline Roberts, Conservator, and Leslie Schramer, Editor
Greetings, Ugly fans! How is it already September?? Time has no meaning anymore … but luckily, we have our Ugly Object blogroll to keep us centered.
We have a special treat for you today. That’s right, it’s a DOUBLE UGLY since, whether you noticed or not in the mad days of the bygone summer, we sort of failed to post July’s Ugly Object.
Though separated by time and distance, these two Uglies have a few things in common. A) They are arguably NOT so ugly, and B) they are not what they appear to be. Let’s meet them, shall we?
KM 1798, mummy portrait, modern (19th century?) forgery, acquired by David Askren in the Fayoum in 1920, gifted to the Kelsey Museum.
The first object is a painted portrait of a woman that was purchased by David Askren, a colleague of Francis Kelsey’s who worked as a physician at the United Presbyterian Hospital in Asyut, Egypt, in the early 20th century. The portrait (along with two similar portraits purchased by Askren at the same time), is now believed to be a modern forgery.
Thanks to our new NEH–funded XRF spectrometer, we now know more about the paint materials that were used to create this portrait—and it seems to confirm what our curators have long suspected. We found the elements barium, iron, lead, nitrogen, sulfur, and zinc in the background and in the woman’s hair and robe, as well as cobalt in the blue beads of her necklace. These are consistent with barium sulfate, cobalt blue, and zinc white—pigments that were introduced in the 18th and 19th centuries.
We can learn a lot from forgeries like this one. For one thing, it demonstrates how the demand for Egyptian antiquities in Europe and the US drove some ethically dubious practices, from the production of fakes to the commodification of real artifacts, in the early 20th century. It also provides comparative physical evidence—pigments we would expect to see in a forgery from this time period—that can help us better separate authentic ancient portraits from fakes. Empirical evidence is key, my friends.
And speaking of fakes, check out this little guy. Looks pretty nice, right? Like a beautiful, polished sample of giallo di Sienna, I bet you were thinking.
KM 29574. Modern plaster plaque painted as giallo di Siena, L. 15.5, W. 11.8, D. 1.5 cm. Presented by Miss Wanere on January 10, 1896. No provenance, No accession date.
WRONG!
You’ve been pranked! It’s not giallo di Sienna at all. It’s not even stone!! It’s a piece of plaster that’s been painted to look like stone! Because, why not? Why cut and polish a piece of relatively common stone when you could sacrifice many hours and possibly your eyesight adding painstakingly realistic details of veining and color to a rectangle of plaster with no apparent function other than to look pretty?
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m a big fan of art for art’s sake. I’m just saying.
This little curiosity was given to the Kelsey Museum in the late 19th century. According to its Kelsey Museum accession record, it once belonged to a “Miss Wanere,” who gave it to the Kelsey on January 10, 1896. We don’t know where she got it, or why she had it. But evidently, she thought it belonged in a museum of antiquities.
We don’t know a lot about this particular piece, but if you’re interested in the biographies of chunks of stone in the Kelsey Museum, you happen to be in luck. The Kelsey has over 700 pieces of ancient stone (yes, I’m aware that virtually all stone is ancient. No lectures, please.) fragments from various quarries and archaeological sites around the Mediterranean. Most were gathered (picked up, purchased, found) by Francis Kelsey himself, who liked them for teaching demonstrations. Others were donated by friends and acquaintances who no doubt knew of Kelsey’s penchant for old rocks of a decorative or architectural nature. All 700+ of these stone fragments (and this one stone look-alike) have been carefully studied by Michigan-affiliated scholars J. Clayton Fant, Leah E. Long, and Lynley McAlpine, who have written a nice little book about them. The illustrated catalogue, which is currently in production here at the Kelsey, focuses on archaeological context and object biographies, following each piece from its creation to eventual deposition in the Kelsey Museum.
We look forward to the day when we can announce the publication of this catalogue. In the meantime, you can come to the Kelsey and see a sampling of these marble fragments in person. They are on the second floor, tucked away in the drawers beneath the Roman Construction case.
The Kelsey gallery cases are filled with ancient artifacts from the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions, with more artifacts available to the public in drawers below the cases. A visitor might be overwhelmed if their goal is to experience every object on display! The objects in the gallery, however, represent a small portion of the collections at the Kelsey due to the limitations of display space. The remainder of our over 100,000 object collection resides in collections storage.
There are numerous reasons why certain objects remain in storage, but their potential for research and adding to our knowledge of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East is not one of them. Researchers from all over the world travel to Ann Arbor to study the collection, each researcher approaching the objects with unique questions about the people who created, owned, and used the objects. In July 2022, researcher Dr. Francois Blondel from the University of Geneva spent several weeks at the Kelsey collecting tree-ring data from wooden objects excavated in Egypt that date to the Roman period (1st century BCE–5th century CE).
Dr. Francois Blondel sitting at the binocular microscope in the Kelsey’s collection storage area.
Using a binocular microscope and measuring table, Dr. Blondel measured the distance between tree rings observed on the wooden objects (including KM 88723, featured in June’s Ugly Object blog). With each press of a button to record the measurement, software, connected to the measuring table, creates (or draws) the growth curve of the wood (or its growth pattern) as it goes along. The resulting curve characterizes all the variations of ring widths in these ancient artifacts crafted from ancient trees. Dr. Blondel repeated this process at least three times with each object to obtain the most complete sequence possible and also to compensate for possible measurement errors due to the lack of ring legibility on some complex objects. This data will then be compared to a database of tree-ring measurements and interpreted by Dr. Blondel in a future academic paper to help date the objects. This process of using the growth rings of trees to date objects is called dendrochronology.
We look forward to what his research uncovers about the ancient world and its people, and how the objects in our collections contribute to his findings!
The binocular microscope and measuring table setup utilized to measure the wood growth rings.Dr. Blondel at work measuring wood growth rings on KM 88723, the panel painting of a Nemesis in the form of a gryphon featured in the June 8, 2022, blog post.
The Kelsey Conservation lab has been in operation since the 1970s—thanks to former director John Pedley, who launched the conservation department here at the Kelsey—and some of our equipment likewise dates back a few decades. Our old binocular microscope may very well go back that far and has served us well over the years, allowing us to clean coins, count threads, and identify any number of salt encrustations. But this summer, we decided that the time had finally come to replace it. In its place we now have a Leica S9i stereomicroscope, and I am admittedly geeking out over it. The new ‘scope has an extendable arm that will allow us to perch the instrument over large objects, as well as a built-in camera, so we can simultaneously examine objects and visualize what we’re looking at in real-time on our laptops.
Carrie examining KM 23976 under the new stereomicroscope.
Last week I used our new microscope to capture the chunky orpiment particles that are embedded in this yellow(ish) paint layer on KM 23976. This painted wood panel from Karanis depicts what looks like an eagle, and around its neck is a gold collar. The artist chose to use orpiment, a brilliantly yellow arsenic sulfide pigment, to create the pendant. Although it has faded and darkened over the centuries, the pendant would have practically sparkled in antiquity. No wonder orpiment’s Latin name, auripigmentum, means “gold pigment.”
Detail of orpiment particles in the painted pendant on KM 23976.
Be sure to stay tuned for more cool images from our new ‘scope!
