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Meet our Director
I'm delighted to be the new Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology! I began October 1, 2007-and it was a memorable first week. Everyone in the Museum was extraordinarily welcoming. More to the point, I think they, like me, felt this might be a great adventure. My graduate studies involved visiting countless European museums in the 1970s, an experience which has given me a lifelong love of museology and collections. More recently, as Director of the British School at Rome I introduced a Fine Art gallery to the institute and since then we have made a splendid little site-museum for Butrint, the Greco-Roman city in Albania where since 1993 I have been engaged in large-scale research and training excavations. Having started in the University of Sheffield as a lecturer in archaeology in 1976, and by way of Rome and now the University of East Anglia (with its distinguished museology course), I arrive at Philadelphia thrilled by the prospect of working in many collaborative areas of archaeology and anthropology. Beyond the unalloyed enthusiasm I experienced during my first week here, I was most struck by this Museum's assets. The range is spell-binding: from the breath-taking photographs of Louis Shotridge in Alaska early in the 1900s to the great Ottoman oil painting of the Museum's 19th-century dig at Nippur to the chance, accompanied by Mediterranean section curator Brian Rose, to see the Troy gold treasure in the Museum's great vaults. The precise and elegant miniaturism of the gold-working betrays the craftsmanship of a great artist. At the end of my induction week, I was left with a strong sense of the spirit of the Museum and especially its place in global research, archaeology and anthropology. Penn Museum is a unique endowment for the University of Pennsylvania, and its trusteeship is both an honour and a great, great responsibility. I look forward to the adventure-and hope you will join us!
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Greetings!
