Tag Archives | museum

OUTREACH – Arqueología, Museos y Educación / Archaeology, Museums & Education

By on July 6, 2012 in DayOfArch2012, Education, Museum Archaeology

This was posted in Spanish and English (English is not my first language: I apologize for any mistakes)

Scroll down to read ENGLISH VERSION

VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL

Trabajo en el Museo Etnográfico “Juan B. Ambrosetti”. Es un museo universitario (depende de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Buenos Aires) que cumple funciones de investigación, difusión y educación, enfocado en antropología y arqueología. Nuestras exhibiciones hablan sobre temáticas vinculadas a los pueblos originarios del actual territorio argentino y de otras partes del mundo.

Soy educadora y guía en el Programa de Público General del Área de Extensión Educativa del Museo. Allí, me encargo de dar visitas guiadas en español e inglés, organizar eventos y actividades culturales y ayudar en el armado de la gráfica para difundir las actividades, entre otras tareas.

 

¿Qué es lo que hice este viernes, en mi Día de Arqueología? Mucho, aunque no siempre relacionado con la disciplina: fue un día de gestión, diseño y difusión y mucho trabajo en equipo: pensando en niños, redes sociales y medios de comunicación.

 

Lo más rápido del día:

¿Alguna vez vieron en televisión esos concursos en que los participantes deben gastar una cierta cantidad de dinero en un corto tiempo? La buena noticia es que nosotros sabemos qué debemos comprar y averiguamos de forma anticipada los mejores precios: pero una vez que tenemos el dinero, ¡hay que correr!

¿La misión? Comprar todos los materiales necesarios para Vacaciones de Invierno 2012 (actividades especiales dirigidas a niños de 5 a 12 años en su receso escolar invernal, del 14 al 29 de julio): desde lápices de colores hasta maquillaje artístico y un maniquí.

 

Mi gran dolor de cabeza:

Terminar de diseñar los volantes y el póster para difundir las Vacaciones de Invierno 2012: soy (casi) arqueóloga: no soy diseñadora ni artista gráfica. Lograr que nuestra difusión se vea atractiva, llamativa y que, a la vez, contenga toda la información que queremos brindar, puede ser motivo de frustraciones… y de grandes satisfacciones cuando todo sale bien.

Vacaciones de Invierno 2012 en el Museo (flyer)

 

Lo que llevó más tiempo:

Subir una videocomunicación acerca de nuestro trabajo como educadores, para participar de un congreso virtual de museos y educación en España. Lo que pensamos sería fácil se complicó: por muchos problemas de conectividad, subir un video de 10 minutos me llevó ¡más de 20 horas!

Lo más esperado:

Armar la página de Facebook del Museo, para compartir y difundir nuestras actividades. ¡Algo que venimos planificando desde hace mucho, mucho tiempo!

El museo Etnográfico está en Facebook (poster)

 

La sorpresa:

Me tocó recibir a un periodista y su equipo de filmación (de un canal privado de televisión por cable) que quería conocer y difundir al Museo entre su audiencia. Los acompañé por tres de las exhibiciones, hablando de nuestra historia, los objetos, las investigaciones y las visitas guiadas que realizamos: un recorrido de 40 minutos que tienen que reducir a sólo 8 minutos: ¿la magia de la televisión?

Y como la vida no termina en el Museo…

Cuando llegué a casa, me puse a trabajar en más diseño gráfico. Esta vez en un banner para el proyecto de investigación arqueológica en el que estoy participando: “Estudio de los procesos sociales prehispánicos en la quebrada de La Cueva (extremo septentrional de la Quebrada de Humahuaca)”, dirigido por la Dra. Ramundo.

¿Qué me quedó pendiente?

Sentarme a estudiar para una visita guiada dirigida a estudiantes de arqueología e historia que vendrán al Museola semana que viene. La visita y sus contenidos los conozco bien, pero trato de actualizarme y mantenerme al día con las últimas investigaciones relacionadas.

SEGUIR ESCRIBIENDO MI TESIS (en mayúsculas por el tono de pánico).

Serán mis tareas de fin de semana…

 

Ya inventarán un día de 30 horas.

 

ENGLISH VERSION

I’m an educator and a guide at the “Juan B. Ambrosetti” Ethnographic Museum. It’s a university museum (we belong to the School of Humanities of the Universidad de Buenos Aires) focused on Indigenous Peoples of what we currently know as Argentina, and other parts of the world. The museum has three aims: research, outreach and education.
What did I do this Friday, in my Day of Archaeology? A lot, although not always related to archaeology.

You can listen to the English translation of my post:

Part 1Day of Archaeology 2012 – part1

Part 2Day of Archaeology 2012 – part2

Part 3Day of Archaeology 2012 – part3

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Education, Community and Irish Archaeological Research

By on July 4, 2012 in DayOfArch2012

Hi. My name is Christina O’Regan and I am the Fieldwork and Educational Director of Irish Archaeological Research (IAR). Three colleagues and I set up this non-profit social organisation in early 2011 with the aim of getting the public more involved with archaeology through education, workshops, and community events. We are all from commercial archaeological backgrounds and wanted to develop our experience in community archaeology.

A focus has been the delivery of school workshops, typically to second level students in years 8 – 12. These workshops begin with a general introduction to the archaeology of Ireland, followed by a practical session varying from how to make and decorate prehistoric-style pottery, learning about diet through artificial ‘poo’ dissection, hands-on interaction with genuine and replica artefacts and prehistoric hunting techniques. These workshops have been incredibly successful, with benefits for students and teachers alike.

My work in IAR varies from day-to-day as I develop workshops, plan for future events and shoot off a few emails to raise the profile of IAR within the archaeological and educational sectors.

For this year’s Festival of British Archaeology, we have decided to host two family-orientated events; the first at Glenariff Forest Park (July 21st & 22nd) and the second at Gosford Forest Park (July 28th & 29th). Our experience with the school workshops has shown us that the more practical the day, the better. Pottery workshops, archery, demonstrations of flint knapping and a children’s activity area will ensure there is something for everyone to enjoy. There will also be a mini museum, with an interactive artefacts table as well as information on the archaeology of the areas where the events will be held (Antrim and Armagh). The Northern Ireland Environment Agency have very generously granted us a loan of some artefacts from both counties and I joyously spent an afternoon sifting through their stores, picking out choice artefacts with the help of Andrew Gault from the Agency. We are also busy planning similar events for National Heritage Week in the Republic of Ireland, August 18th – 26th.

A trial run of the Open Air Museum at the Carnival of Colours, Londonderry showed us the enormous benefits this type of venture can have in increasing awareness of local heritage within communities.

Social media has been a lifeline for IAR with our Facebook page now ‘liked’ by over 1,000 people. The page allows us to announce all of our upcoming events as well as share archaeological discoveries and support other institutions and companies. Facebook also allows us to easily disseminate our free online magazine, Irish Archaeological Research and we have just put out a call for articles for the fourth (summer) edition. As editor of the e-zine, I envisage many late nights over the coming weeks organising layout and thinking up witty headlines!

For more information on any of our events see www.irisharchaeologicalresearch.com

 

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Museum Archaeology Prep and a Bit of Gold Digging

By on June 30, 2012 in Day of Archaeology, DayOfArch2012, Digital Archaeology, Egypt, Finds, Museum Archaeology

Good morning from Berlin! We are finally getting a bit of sun….which we need given the Euro2012 match results last night (Glückwunsch an Spanien und Italien!). So — since my Day of Archaeology post last year, I’ve started a Marie Curie COFUND fellowship at Freie Universität Berlin, in association with the Dahlem Research School and TOPOI. My research project is entitled:  A Comparative Study of Scribal and Artistic Spaces in Early Egypt and the Ancient Near East: Integrating micro- and macro-scale analyses. More information can be found here and I am also keeping a blog on my progress. (In fact, in addition to posting here I really need to update said blog, but that will probably happen Monday now since today is already chock full!)

So here is a bit about what I am getting up to today. I am in the course of planning several museum research visits for this summer. I need to document 100 ancient art- and writing-bearing objects dating to the early period of graphical development (c.3200-c.2500 BCE) in both southern Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley. I am documenting and examining both portable objects (e.g. cylinder seals, impressed sealings, cuneiform tablets, labels) and fixed image-bearing surfaces (e.g. stelae, tomb relief, rock art), using Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI).

Inscribed tablet

Stone tablet with early writing incised into its surfact, University of Pennsylvania Museum, B16105

Although I am an Egyptologist first and foremost, I did dabble a bit in Near Eastern archaeology and languages (e.g. Akkadian) as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. With this project I am finally getting back to this side interest which is quite exciting. But it means coordinating museum research with both the Egyptian and Near Eastern curators and other staff at each museum. This morning my goal is to get my object list and research permission request sent off the the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology before lunch.

Dahlem Research School in der Hittorfstrasse

Dahlem Research School

This afternoon several other post-docs and I will be participating in a peer coaching session at the Dahlem Research School, with the help of a successful grant applicant, on drafts proposals for funding we’ve been preparing for a follow-on research projects. My COFUND fellowship is for 15 months, and in addition to completing a research project this year, I am tasked with bringing in funding for a follow project (Note: details for the next COFUND application should be posted soon at link above. Do consider applying!).

It’s great to be in a fellowship programme that is emphatically about training and career development. Many fellowships / post-docs focus resources on completing of a particular piece of research. Fair enough I suppose, but having more advice, time and support thrown in my direction to help ensure the next gig is lined up is great. The level of regular contact, mentoring and–yes–deadlines that the DRS provide both for achieving our short-term goals and hammering out a longer-term career plan and getting it funded is super valuable. I need to take even more advantage of this in fact.

Anyway, I’d best finish sorting out this museum object request list and reading my colleagues’ funding proposals for our peer review session.

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Curating a Small Archaeology Museum

By on June 29, 2012 in DayOfArch2012, Museum Archaeology

I am the curator and archaeologist for the Lost City Museum, a small archaeology museum located in Overton, NV. The main focus of the museum is the Virgin River Branch of the Ancestral Puebloans (also known as the Anasazi) who lived at the archaeological site complex formally known as Pueblo Grande de Nevada, but more commonly referred to as the Lost City. The Lost City Museum has a collection of artifacts dating not only to the Ancestral Puebloans, but to the group that occupied southern Nevada after it was abandoned by the Ancestral Puebloans, the Southern Paiutes.

As the curator of a small museum I have many different projects going at once, ranging from a rehousing project that is being funded through money to organizing special events at the museum. One of the projects I am currently working on is the analysis of the museum’s incised stone collection. The incised stones were collected from Clark County, NV, the southern-most county in Nevada. Incised stones are intriguing artifacts because archaeologists aren’t entirely sure of their prehistoric use. Some suggest that it is a form of portable rock art while others suggest they could have been used by shaman during rituals.

Sometimes it feels like I don’t choose the projects I work on, they choose me. As I was rehousing the archaeology collection of the Lost City Museum I kept coming across more and more incised stones. I knew the museum had a couple dozen incised stones that were recently on display at the museum. It wasn’t until I went through all of the boxes in the collections storage areas that I realized the museum had over one hundred incised stones (this perfectly illustrates why I started the rehousing project; I never knew for sure what the museum had and what wasn’t stored in the correct place). Given the number of incised stones at the museum I felt that it was extremely important that I properly catalog and analyze the stones so that the information could be used by researchers in the future.

My analysis of each incised stones consists of recording the dimensions of each stone and noting whether the stone is hand size or smaller (the majority of incised stones can be comfortably carried in a hand). Next I categorize the design present on the stones. A past researcher was helpful enough to come up with eight categories of incised stone designs: curvilinear, dendritic, circle, band, bisect, cross-hatch, anthropomorph, and no discernible design. An example of a curvilinear design can in seen in the included photograph. Next I determine the stone’s material type. A majority of the stones analyzed so far have been sandstone, a readily available stone in southern Nevada. Once I gather all of the data I will be able see the patterns present within the collection. I can then compare this information to the information already obtained from the analysis of other incised stone collection at Nevada State Museums and see if the Lost City Museum collection differs greatly from those collections.

This is an ongoing project because as much as I would like to focus all of my time on the analysis of the incised stones, new projects or issues pop up on a daily or weekly basis. As the curator of a small museum I wear many hats, and I often have to put projects on hold while I research something for a fellow archaeologist or give a tour to a group of Girl Scouts. One great thing about being an archaeologist for a museum is that it is unlikely I will run out of research topics any time soon.

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Archaeology Lab Rat in West Virginia: Day 455

By on June 29, 2012 in Day of Archaeology, DayOfArch2012, Museum Archaeology

Happy Day of Archaeology 2012 folks!

Presently, I am a curator for the research facility at Grave Creek Mound Archaeological Complex in Moundsville, West Virginia.  We are the first curation facility for archaeological artifacts built within the state (opened in 2008) and we house thousands of artifacts either excavated by state/federal organizations or personal collections donated by citizens.  The complex consists of not only the research/collections wing but is also home to the Delf Norona Museum.

My job varies on a daily basis but today I continued inventorying artifacts from a Fort Ancient Native American site formerly located in the southern part of the state.  Notice I use the word “formerly.”   Like so many archaeological sites worldwide, the site was destroyed after excavation and no longer exists.  It is now home to an industrial plant, one reason why our jobs as archaeologists are so valuable!  We are recording a past that may not be around for the future due to industrialization, roads, or any number of other destructive changes that can occur to the land.

Shell Tempered Cord Marked Sherds

Around 10:30 am, I looked up from analyzing a few prehistoric ceramic sherds and saw the observation window filled with a group of inquisitive, happy kids visiting the complex for a field trip.  I must admit, it has taken some time getting used to having people stare at you while you work throughout the day, but I now welcome it.  Who knows, maybe there is a future archaeologist in the crowd!

Possible future archaeologists!

This afternoon, we were fortunate to have Christina, one of our regular volunteers come in.  She is currently working on processing a large artifact collection that was donated to the facility many years ago.  She spent a few hours washing  lithic artifacts that will ultimately be labeled, sorted, and made available for researchers.  I don’t know what we would do without all of our reliable, hardworking volunteers!

For me, Day of Archaeology 2012 ended with inputting data into our always growing database (with some background 1980′s genre music playing from the internet radio to break the silence).  While it’s far from being glamorous, it’s priceless work.  At the end of the day, I’m just trying to do my part to preserve a little bit of West Virginia’s past for our future.

Inventorying prehistoric ceramic sherds

 

 

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Day of Archaeology – LAARC Lottery Part 6 (Environmental Finds)

By on June 29, 2012 in Day of Archaeology, DayOfArch2012, Environmental Archaeology, Finds, Museum Archaeology

And so we’ve reached our last section of the Museum of London’s Archaeological Archive. Thanks for playing the LAARC lottery and here are our last two objects for the Day of Archaeology.

The Environmental section of our Archive is the smallest – representative of the small size of the flora and fauna that are processed by flotation through large-scale tanks with small-scale sieves. If you want to see what a raw sample looks like, check out Sarah Matthews (MOLA) ‘dirty’ blog.

First up, our lucky lottery player chose shelf number 43 and our ecofact is a selection of seeds from site archive PRY91, an excavation that took place on the outer reaches of London in the borough of Kingston Upon Thames. This site produced a total of 61 sediment samples and the ecofacts date to the late Iron Age/Roman period. What we have here are cereal grains of wheat/barley. Our Archaeology Collections Manager, Glynn Davis, blogged about a similar ecofact from the City of London. These environmental ‘objects’ are extremely important for understanding cultivated foodstuffs as well as the nature of settlement itself.

Wheat grains from the Iron Age/Roman period

Wheat grains from the Iron Age/Roman period, and from our shelf 43

And so, our last ecofact from a long day’s blogging. So what did shelf 36 have amongst its boxes…of course, it’s a coprolite!

This sample, excavated from site BUF90 – Bull Wharf, Upper Thames Street, was accompanied by a note stating it was ‘hand collected’…archaeologists are known for their odd sense of humour. Need we say more!

Coprolite from BUF90

Coprolite from BUF90 – and shelf 36

 

And so that brings us to the end of our Day of Archaeology LAARC Lottery. We hope you enjoyed it, we certainly did, and a big thank you to everyone who took part – we couldn’t have done it without you. Apologies also to anyone who suggested a shelf number but didn’t get their object shown – we simply couldn’t do all of them in the time we had – but we hope you found the blogs and posts interesting too.

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Day of Archaeology – LAARC Lottery Part 5 (Textile Finds)

By on June 29, 2012 in Day of Archaeology, DayOfArch2012, Finds, Museum Archaeology

Day of Archaeology: Blog 5 – Textiles

Moving onto and into our Leather & Textile store, we have two classic objects chosen by you, completely at random.

Our first randomly selected object, from shelf number 876, is a Roman leather shoe, excavated from site BUC87 – once the heart of Londinium. The LAARC holds over 5000 Roman and medieval shoes (we are the largest Archeological Archive in the world after all) and this artefact is a fine example of its type. The leather sole of the shoe has been preserved through waterlogged conditions but once exposed would quickly dry and shrink. Luckily the Museum ofLondon’s conservation department owns a magic machine called a freeze-dryer which, through the process of sublimation, leaves these leather objects in a very stable condition.

Roman leather shoe

Roman leather shoe from BUC87 – and shelf 876

 A common comment on archaeological Roman shoes is that they always seem very small. The leather may have shrunk somewhat after two millennia in the ground and the freeze-drying process may add minimally to this, but on the whole our Roman Londoners seem to have small feet…Perhaps a comparative study should be conducted with the many Roman skeletal remains held at the Museum’s Centre for Human Bioarchaeology!

Our second object is a piece of post-medieval textile from site EAG87  (and shelf 809), excavated by the Department of Urban Archaeology (DUA) back in the late 1980s. Archaeological textiles suffer from damage to both their texture and colour; however, our Curator of Fashion & Decorative Arts gets particularly excited about brown bits of wool!

Post-medieval cloth

Post-medieval cloth from EAG87 – and shelf 809

Again our textile much like other organics and inorganic, such as metal, has survived through waterlogged but anaerobic conditions. This fragmentary piece was probably part of the C18th backfill of a well excavated on this site.

Our last major store section holds our Environmental finds. These are typically extremely small objects that take up little space (hence the small shelf range) and include objects such as seeds, pollen and small animal bones etc. Tweet using #dayofarch or #LAARC, or message us a number below, between 1 and 44 to discover, completely at random, what that shelf holds…

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Penn Museum Archaeologist; Near East

By on June 29, 2012 in DayOfArch2012, Museum Archaeology

I love being in the field, but this year I’m not excavating. My work is museum related for now, an important part of what we do. So, here’s my Day of Archaeology so far:

Got up around 6:30am and checked my email through my Blackberry. Found that our subcontract to the British Museum has gone through (much of what I do these days is done jointly with London and they are five hours ahead of me, so they have already begun work when I get up).

Got to the museum around 8:00am. I live nearby, which I like because I can walk to work. My computer is my secretary, so I checked on my ‘to do’ file. Yes, if I were more up-to-date I’d just use Google Calendar or some such, but I like having individual files for each day on my hard drive. I looked through the previous day making sure the most pressing things got done, deleting those items and assigning most pressing for today. I had a committee meeting for the Ur Project yesterday; I have to write up the minutes today for distribution to others on the project, that gets the most pressing mark for the morning.

 

Brad Hafford in his cluttered office, 524 Museum

 

Our project is taking legacy data, excavation material from 1922-1934, and modernizing, that is, recording it all digitally and uniting it in one place – the interweb. The excavation was a very important one, that of the ancient city of Ur in southern Iraq and was conducted jointly by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Under laws of the day, artifacts collected were divided between the nascent state of Iraq with its newly founded National Museum and the two excavating institutions. Thus, half the artifacts are in Baghdad, the other half are split between Philadephia and London. But there is much more to an excavation than artifacts. There are also field notes, photographs, catalogues, letters, telegrams, receipts, drawings, watercolors, and so much more. We are digitizing and uniting all of this material. We want to create a site where anything and everything concerning Ur and its excavation can be accessed, researched, and gazed upon in wonder; all in open-source, freely accesible and linked data form.

Creating it takes time, patience, and money. It takes access to the artifacts and archives which are not solely spread among the three museums mentioned, but objects also secondarily sent to many smaller museums around the world, paricularly the Commonwealth at the time. There are Ur artifacts from our excavations as far afield as Australia and New Zealand. And many more in the UK: Almost 1000 artifacts are in the Birmingham Museum and Art Galleries. Not only that, but reconstructing the original numbering system for artifacts and photographs, and connecting that to the modern museum numbering systems, linking objects back to their original field records is not as easy as one might think. Our work is quite complicated. But also most worthwhile.

Museum cafe opens around 9am. Armed with coffee, and organized on my computer daily to-do list, I can face the rest of my day in confidence.

10:00am Eastern: Skype conference with British Museum colleagues. We’ve been trying now for some weeks to establish dates and room reservations for a project meeting near the end of the calendar year. Since this one needs to include funding agency, high-level museum administrators, principle investigators, other museum representatives, etc. it’s been difficult to mesh schedules. It’s also difficult to get space in the British Museum since it is in high demand.

Next we discussed the state of the merger of datasets between our two museums concerning Ur. It’s going slowly because we created our digital data from two sets of records divided by decades and the Atlantic. These records have to be meshed so that a unique identifier refers to each and every object. Then we have to get it all on a server so that both museums can access, update, and correct it. As I have probably already noted, re-unification is not easy. But we have great people on both sides of the pond working on it. Birmingham is on board and we’re starting the process of contacting the other institutions that have subsets of the Ur material. And of course we’re still trying to get the Iraq National Museum on board, but politics has gotten in the way for now.

More emails and arrangements have placed me at about the half-way point of my Day of Archaeology. More in part 2…

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Day of Archaeology in Macedonia

By on June 29, 2012 in Day of Archaeology, DayOfArch2012, Early Medieval, Education, Excavation, Museum Archaeology

Archaeologists in Macedonia, under the leadership of NGO Archaeologica, have joined together to celebrate this day by making a documentary film, photo exhibition and public presentations that you can follow the Web site of Archaeologica (www.archaeologica.org.mk), and the web site of the Day of Archaeology 2012.

We filmed one documentary about one day in archaeology and how is it spend in museums or on the sites. Some of our archaeologists are doing underwater archaeology and you can see the second short movie about their job and their ordinary day on the field. The third short movie is about making of our documentary about the site Golemo Gradiste – Konjuh, Macedonia. These days Archaeologica was filming this site for making a documentary for following season 2013 and representing the movie on the forthcoming archaeological film festivals.   Enjoy watching the videos.

A day with Macedonian Archaeology

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Skeletons, but not in cupboards

By on June 29, 2012 in DayOfArch2012, Finds, Osteology

Hampshire Arts & Museums Service is carrying out an audit of all the human remains in its Collections.  Where appropriate, this includes the rebagging and reboxing of material.  Garrard Cole, currently an Hon Research Assistant at UCL, is tackling four skeletons from Harrow Way Farm, Penton Mewsey, excavated by the Test Valley Archaeological Trust in 1988.  This improvement in the physical storage conditions goes hand in hand with an update of the associated records and  compilation of a database.

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