Museum Applied
Science Center for Archaeology (MASCA) Section
The Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology (MASCA) was initiated in 1961 by museum director Froelich Rainey and directed by physicist Elizabeth Ralph. Its primary focus was to advance understanding of the then-new technique of radiocarbon-dating; this work was informed by dendrochronological studies carried out by Henry Michael. Our second Scientific Director, physicist Stuart J. Fleming, took a much broader view of the field; his vision was to apply scientific techniques to anthropological questions. As the field of archaeology has evolved, MASCA, too, has changed. Our scientific studies now focus on human transformation of the material world in three broad overlapping categories: landscape, food, and materials.
mcgovern@sas.upenn.edu Senior
Research Scientist; Adjunct Associate Professor; Anthropology Director
of Baq'ah Valley (Jordan) Project, Near East Section
Specialties/Interests:
Archaeology
Near East and Egypt
Bronze and Iron Ages
Applications of the physical and biological sciences in archaeology
Directing archaeological projects in Jordan
Head of the Archaeochemistry and Archaeoceramics Laboratory
Organic contents analysis
Pottery provenancing
Technological innovation and cultural change
Current/Past Research:
Dr. McGovern's research and publication continues to center around the chemical identification of ancient foods and fermented beverages. His bookAncient Wine: The Search for the Origins
of Viniculture(Princeton: Princeton University, 2003) summarizes fifteen years of work by the Molecular Archaeology Laboratory in MASCA. A revised edition in paperback, with a foreword by Robert G. Mondavi, appeared at the beginning of 2007. Two ground-breaking DNA studies were published this past year, which point to eastern Turkey as where the earliest winemaking and the domestication of the Eurasian grapevine took place.
Expanding out from their usual focus on the Near East and Mediterranean, the laboratory confirmed by chemical analysis the earliest fermented beverage in the world: a mixture of rice, honey, and hawthorn fruit and/or grape from the Chinese Neolithic site of Jiahu, dated ca. 7000-6000 B.C. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 101.51
(2004): 17593-98, search for 10.1073/pnas.0407921102). As was done earlier for the "King Midas funerary feast" beverage
("Midas Touch"), Dogfish Head Brewery (Rehoboth Beach and Milton, DE) re-created the ancient Neolithic beverage, which was first tasted at a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on May 19, 2005. The beverage was subsequently the focus of the Museum’s annual beer-tasting event with Michael Jackson, Nobel prize laureate Roald Hoffmann’s Entertaining Science cabaret in Greenwich Village, and two special programs in San Francisco at the Asian Art Museum.
Most recently, in collaboration with colleagues at Cornell, Berkeley and Hershey Foods, the laboratory chemically identified the earliest cacao beverage in the Americas, the elite counterpart to grape wine in the Old World .
Dr. McGovern also gave keynote addresses at the Geological Society of America’s annual conference, the inaugural TASTE3 conference and 40th anniversary of the Robert Mondavi Winery in Napa, and the Eastern Analytical Society meeting. The results of state-of-the-art analyses of ancient Egyptian vessels– using Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (MS)-MS and Solid Phase Microextraction–was reported on at American Society of Enology and Viticulture conference. One of the earliest resinated wine vessels from Egypt, dated to ca. 3150 B.C., was shown to have had a mint (genus Mentha) additive. The wine in a later Byzantine wine jar from Nubia had been laced with rosemary (genus Rosminthus).
photo:
Patrick McGovern collecting wild grapevines at the headwaters of the Tigris
River. (Photograph courtesy P. E. McGovern)
Dr.
Naomi F. Miller
Senior Research Scientist, Museum Applied
Science Center for Archaeology (MASCA)
Specialties/Interests:
Archaeology
Ancient Near East and Central Asia
Paleoethnobotany
Current/Past Research:
In the summer of 2006, Dr. Miller began work on a
demonstration garden at the Gordion museum in the
village of Yassihöyük, Turkey in collaboration
with two Turkish botanists, Mecit Vural and
Hüseyin K. Firingioglu. She is also providing expert
advice on using living plants to enhance Gordion
site preservation and interpretation of the
ruins, where Penn Museum archaeologists have been
working since the 1950s.
In the spring, 2007, she presented results of
Gordion archaeobiological research at the annual
meeting of the Society for American Archaeology
with Melinda Zeder (Smithsonian Institution).
Gordion, home of King Midas and place where
Alexander cut the Gordian knot, lies in a valley
characterized by an erratic rainfall pattern. The
subsistence economy at Gordion (Early Iron Age to
medieval times) integrated wild and domesticated
plants and animals in an archaeologically
recognizable pattern. Proportions of bones of
food animals and the ratio of seeds of wild
plants to cereals vary according to periods when
herding or farming were emphasized. In
particular, during most of the sequence, the
economy emphasized pastoral production: high
wild:cereal ratios indicative of steppe grazing,
high proportions of sheep and goat bone, maximum
use of distant forest resources (red deer and
pine). Orientation toward farming was greatest at
Middle Phrygian Gordion (King Midas's era), where
we find low wild:cereal ratios indicative of
foddering, relatively high proportions of cattle
and pig bone, maximum use of local resources
(hare, little pine), high proportions of seed
indicators of irrigation.
The broader implication of this research is that
the most effective survival strategy in this
unpredictable environment is to emphasize sheep-
and goat-herding. The Middle Phrygian period, a
time of maximum population and wealth, is the
anomaly in the sequence. During that time, wealth
created the conditions that allowed people to
farm productively. In this case example, farming
did not create wealth. Rather, it was the well
organized, high-density population that created
the infrastructure for secure farming, but when
that infrastructure collapsed, the economy
reverted to a more sustainable one that combined
herding with rainfall agriculture.
In the coming year, Dr. Miller will continue her
work at Gordion, including publication of the
archaeobotanical sequence and new work on Roman
period deposits. She returned to Gordion in June,
2007, to continue work on using vegetation to
enhance the touristic experience of the site.
Dr. Miller and her MASCA colleagues, Dr. Kathleen
Ryan and Dr. Katherine Moore, are organizing a
museum colloquium for January 2008, "Forces of
Nature: Environmental Risk and Resilience as
Long-term Factors of Cultural Change."
Research
Scientist, Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology (MASCA)
Specialties/Interests:
Archaeology
Ethnoarchaeology
Zooarchaeology
Ethnoveterinary
East Africa, India, and Ireland
Current/Past Research:
Dr. Ryan has completed five seasons of archaeological fieldwork on the
Laikipia Plateau of Kenya, seeking out remains of human settlement from
the Later Stone Age to the present. Her goal is to track the transition
from hunting to herding (Later Stone Age to Pastoral Neolithic) and, in
particular, to pinpoint the beginnings of dairy production, a fitting
complement to her 12 years of ethnoarchaeological research among the Maasai
cattle herders of southern Kenya.
Between 2002 and 2005, together with her Kenyan collaborators* and MASCA
colleagues, William Fitts and Lindsay Shafer, Dr. Ryan has discovered
and mapped eight rock shelters, preliminarily dated to the Later Stone
Age/Pastoral Neolithic. An additional seven open-range settlements have
been identified, producing artifacts spanning the Later Stone Age, Pastoral
Neolithic, Iron Age, and Maasai historic periods. All of these sites have
now been surveyed, using a state-of-the-art survey system developed by
William Fitts for MASCA, and maps have been created and superimposed on
satellite images. Judging by the range of artifacts scattered on the surface,
this area was probably intermittently, if not continuously, occupied from
the Later Stone Age until the recent past. Test excavations carried out
at one rock shelter, and at three house mounds within two open-range settlements,
have produced lithics and pottery that confirm this dating. In addition,
animal bone remains, including domestic cattle, were found at two of the
house mounds.
* Collaborators include Dr. Karega-Munene, Associate Professor, United
States International University, Nairobi; Mulu Muia, Research Scientist,
Archaeology Division, National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi. A paper on our
preliminary results will be submitted for publication following the Congress
of the Pan African Archaeological Association for Prehistory and Related
Studies in Gabarone, Botswana, in July 2005.
In 2004, Dr. Ryan entered into a collaboration with Dr. Richard Evershed's
Biogeochemistry Research Centre at Bristol University (England), to extract
and analyze possible lipid residues on Laikipia prehistoric pottery in
order to detect milk fats. If milk fats are found, and in sufficient quantities
for radiocarbon dating, it will be possible to directly date the use of
milk products and thus the first use of a pastoral mode of production
on the Laikipia Plateau.
Dr. Ryan collaborated with
Dr. Daniel Bradley and Dr. Ceiridwen Edwards at the Department of Genetics
at Trinity College Dublin for DNA analysis of cattle bones from prehistoric
contexts in Laikipia. She organized, for final publication, the faunal
data from Dr. Possehl'si excavations at Rojdi, Gujarat, in collaboration
with Dr. Pam Crabtree at NYU; undertook research on animal diseases in
early historic Ireland as described in the Old Irish Laws and recorded
in the Irish Annals; and presented two papers at
the Society for Africanist Archaeologists (SAfA) in Calgary in June 2006
and at the International Council of Zooarchaeology (ICAZ) in Mexico City
in August 2006.
Dr.
Patrick E. McGovern
Dr.
Naomi F. Miller
Dr.
Kathleen Ryan