Research Associate, Near East Section, Penn Museum; National Geographic Archaeology Fellow
Specialties/Interests:
Ancient trade
The development of cultural complexity north of the Greater Near East
Current/Past Research:
More than ten years of archaeological excavations at the site of Anau, Turkmenistan (the most recent excavations during the summer of 2005) has revealed a sequence of occupation from 4500 BC through 1500 AD. Investigations of the earliest levels were published in a Museum monograph: A Central Asian Village at the Dawn of Civilization (University of Pennsylvania Museum, 2003). Today, Dr. Hiebert notes, much of the real discovery in archaeology happens in the lab – and that is no different for the ongoing analysis of the Anau collections currently at MASCA (Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology). Preliminary lab results include new finds of early domestic bread wheat, and abundant remains of sheep, cattle, and a wild horse-relative already at the earliest periods of farming in Turkmenistan.
2003 brought the opportunity for researchers to return to Afghanistan. Since then, on a request of the government of Afghanistan, Dr. Hiebert has been re-inventorying the collections of the Kabul Museum – one of the greatest museums of Silk Road archaeology and history. After nearly 8 months of cataloging, Dr. Hiebert has learned that much of Afghanistan’s most famous archaeological treasures are safe and in good condition. For more information, see links, below.
Curator of Islamic Art and Professor, History of Art department, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Holod continues publication preparations for the Archaeological Survey of Jerba (field seasons 1996-2000). The survey will be published as a supplement to the Journal of Roman Archaeology with the title Jerba Studies. The survey found major shifts in settlement patterns, ranging from a landscape of several urban centers within a countryside of villas and farms during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, to a densely packed medieval environment of small farms and mosques, but no urban entities, to an early modern pattern of new estates and new towns.
Dr. Holod, with colleagues Ann Brownlee, Nancy Boukidis, Kezia and Niko Knauer, Ann Kuttner, Alexander Leskov, Victor Mair, Holly Pittman, and Charles Williams, and students Wu Xin, Lilliana Milkova, Thomas Morton, and Michael Frachetti, visited southern Ukraine and Crimea where they toured archaeological sites and museum collections with members of the Institute of Archaeology of Ukraine. Scythian kurgans, Greek settlements, churches and cave monasteries, Genoese fortresses, Goth, Karaite and Tatar towns and cemeteries are but a small sample of rich yet unfamiliar archaeological record that deserves further exploration in the near future.
She spent fall 2002 as Clark Professor at Williams College and Clark Art Institute. In connection with this appointment, she curated an exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art entitled "From the Two Pens: Line and Color in Islamic Art" consisting of selected materials from the Near East Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
She visited her old haunts in Yazd, Iran in October, 2002 giving the keynote speech, "Our Works Point to Us: On Cultural Heritage" at a seminar entitled "Architecture for Changing Societies" organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
Deputy Director for Academic Programs; Curator, Near East Section; Class of 1963 Endowed Term Professor in the Humanities; Professor, History of Art; Director, Center for Ancient Studies
Specialties/Interests:
Ancient Mesopotamia
Iranian Plateau in the Bronze Age
Rise of complex societies
Administrative and early writing Systems
Art and visual culture of the ancient Near East
Current/Past Research:
Dr. Pittman has been at the University of Pennsylvania since 1989, leaving a curatorial position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. She teaches classes on the art and culture of the ancient Near East, and currently is focusing on the art and culture of Bronze Age Iran. She has excavated in Cyprus, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran and has had primary publication responsibilities of the art and especially the glyptic art from the sites of Malyan in the Fars province of Iran; Uruk period Tell Brak; Uruk period Hacienbi Tepe. In addition she has worked with Marcella Frangipane in the analysis of the seals from Arslantepe in eastern Turkey. She has published on the art of the Bronze Age and Iron Ages of Iran and Mesopotamia, including an in-depth study of the Glazed Steatite (Piedmont) style seals distributed across the Near East from the eastern Iranian plateau to western Syria and the Levant around 2900 BC.
At the Museum, she co-curated the traveling exhibition of the "Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur." She teaches classes in the Museum focusing on the collections of seals in the Near East Section.
Her current research interests revolve around the excavations of the sites of Konar Sandal South and North in the region of Jiroft in south-central Iran. The area was first revealed by extensive looting in 2000 and 2001, and Iranian archaeologists began excavation at the rice Bronze Age sites in the valley of the Halil Roud under the direction of Youssef Madjidzadeh in 2004. Dr. Pittman, together with students from the graduate programs of the History of Art, the Art and Archeology of the Mediterranean World and the Anthropology Department, has participated in two seasons of excavation of the two mounds and the exploration and survey of the region. The preliminary results of these first seasons of excavation have revealed a hitherto unknown civilization of the Early Bronze Age that interacted with societies in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley and Central Asia. The region has been explored previous only by Sir Aurel Stein in his early investigations of the region, Beatrice de Cardi in excavations at Bampur, and by C. Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky at Tepe Yahya. The new excavations have produced an extensive ceramic assemblage, monumental, domestic, and craft production areas. Most interesting among the finds are more than 150 seal impressions of cylinder and stamp seals used in economic administration.
Photo: Dr. Pittman in Iran.
Dr. Brian Spooner
spooner@sas.upenn.edu Curator for Near Eastern Ethnology, Penn Museum, and Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Specialties/Interests:
Middle East and South Asia
Islam
Literacy
Social organization
Conflict
Globalization
Current Research:Dr. Spooner works on processes of globalization, positive and negative, as they relate to the countries of the Middle East and Central and South Asia. He is currently completing two projects. The first deals with the history and sociology of writing in the region, and its relation to the formalities of public behavior and cultural identities. (The second revised edition of his "Reading Nasta'liq: Persian and Urdu hands from 1500 to the present, Mazda Publications" was published in July 2007, and Writing and the Social Order, based on a conference held at the Museum in October 2006, will be published in 2008. Both are co-authored with William L. Hanaway). The second deals with trajectories of terrorist activity related to the region, and how and why they are currently changing.
Dr. Spooner is Consulting editor for the Encyclopaedia Iranica, and serves on the boards of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, the American Institute of Iranian Studies, and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies
Dr. Voigt has served as Director of Excavation and Survey for the Museum's Gordion Project since 1988. At Gordion, Turkey, where the Museum has been working since 1950, her initial excavation goal was to define a chronological sequence for the site, which was occupied from around 3000 BC to Medieval times. A stratigraphic sounding carried out in 1988-89 brought new information on the early Iron Age settlement, the time when people speaking the Phrygian language immigrated into Anatolia and settled at Gordion. Within two centuries of their arrival, the Phrygians were constructing formal stone buildings with a megaron plan ornamented with low relief sculptures, an indication of their growing political and economic power. A far more elaborate palace quarter stratified above these early megara, excavated by Rodney S. Young between 1950 and 1972, was burned, preserving the contents of many buildings. Young linked this Early Phrygian Destruction Level to King Midas, who in the late 8th century BC ruled a Phrygian state that extended over much of central Anatolia. The 1988-89 research led to a questioning of this date for the Destruction Level. A combination of artifact analysis, radiocarbon dates and tree-ring dates have now established that the Early Phrygian capital burned at least a century earlier than had been thought, circa 800 BC. Whatever the cause of the fire, we now know that the rebuilding of the Phrygian capital began almost immediately after the ruins cooled, and it was this magnificent rebuilt city that Midas ruled.
Research since 1993 has focused on later periods at Gordion, especially Hellenistic and Roman times (ca 330 BC-AD 200). The most startling results have been for the 3rd century BC, when the site was controlled by the Galatians--Celtic speakers who had come into Anatolia as mercenaries in 278 BC. One of the questions being examined is the effect of the arrival of these European immigrants on Gordion and the extent to which they controlled the city politically and economically. Changes in the form of the settlement, architecture, tools and weapons and ritual practices suggest a strong Celtic presence. Evidence for headhunting and human sacrifice was found in two areas, mirroring practices well-known in Iron Age Europe.
Professor Voigt began her career with the excavation of a small early farming community in Northwestern Iran called Hajji Firuz Tepe, a site that produced evidence for the earliest production of wine around 5500 BC. She retains an interest in Neolithic societies and especially in their ideology and ritual. Recent articles discuss the use of images at sites in Turkey such as Çatalhöyük, Gritille, and Hacilar, showing changes in the function of clay and stone figures of humans between 8500-5000 BC, and more specifically, changes in the ways that women were portrayed.
Associate Curator-in-Charge; Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Zettler is excavating the site of Tell es-Sweyhat, located on the east bank of the Euphrates in northern Syria. The Tell es-Sweyhat region is a marginal environment for agriculture and pastoralism plays an important part in the subsistence economy today, and probably also did in the past. Tell es-Sweyhat was occupied throughout the third millennium bce (or Early Bronze Age), but by the end of that period Tell es-Sweyhat had become a large fortified urban center with a citadel surrounded by an extensive lower town. The site offers important opportunities for understanding the dynamics of subsistence in marginal environments, the role of pastoralism in the emergence of early state societies, as well as the topography of northern Mesopotamian cities. Though the Tell es-Sweyhat Project has focused to date on the beginning and end of the 3rd millennium, the most recent 2000-2001 field seasons, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, have revealed fortifications and monumental mudbrick platforms of the early-to-mid 3rd millennium (see Expedition 44/1), suggesting that Tell es-Sweyhat was a substantial settlement at the time of Ebla's floruit, and may have been one of the centers, perhaps Burman, mentioned in well-known letter from Enna-Dagan, king of Mari, to an unnamed contemporary at Ebla. The geographical name Burman occurs frequently in Ebla's administrative texts, where its king, his wife and the queen, an Eblaite princess named Zimnikubar, his sons and Burman's elders are all listed as recipients of textiles/garments. In addition, Tisha-lim, another Eblaite princess and queen of Emar, held land in the area of Burman.
In addition to his work on Tell es-Sweyhat, Dr. Zettler continues his long-standing interest in the meshing of textual sources and material culture to build more holistic histories of ancient Mesopotamia. He recently published a review and critique of efforts to integrate the two strands of data in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. He has also been working on reconstructing the archaeological contexts of tablets from the time of the Third Dynasty of Ur (2100-2000) found at Nippur and Ur. The Third Dynasty of Ur is the most richly documented period in ancient Mesopotamian history, with more than 40,000 tablets published to date, but the bulk of the tablets come from illicit excavations and the findspots of the others remain poorly delineated.
Dr. Zettler co-curated the Museum's popular traveling exhibit Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur. The exhibit has appeared at twelve venues throughtout the US, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors. Artifacts from the Royal Cemetery of Ur are currently on display in Art of the First Cities at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur catalogue is still available through Museum Publications. Zettler is also involved in other major Museum projects including efforts to make more of the collections from excavations at Ur available to other institutions, an effort funded by the Museum Loan Network; the restoration of the Urnamma Stele, made possible by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation; and, the conservation and rehousing of Parthian and Sassanian clay coffins from the Nippur excavations, supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Coming soon--> A World of Research - Learn about Penn Museum's excavations all over the world in an interactive map.
Dr. Fredrik T. Hiebert
Dr. Renata Holod
Dr. Holly Pittman
Dr. Brian Spooner
Dr. Mary M. Voigt
Dr. Richard L. Zettler