Students Glean Insights from an Ancient Skeleton at the Penn Museum
Penn Museum’s Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM), have learned about scientific analysis of skeletal remains via a most extraordinary specimen: a very ancient, very rare human skeleton originally from the world-famous site of Ur in modern day Iraq, rediscovered in the Museum’s storage.
Penn students in the course, Living World in Archaeological Science, offered in the Penn Museum’s Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM), have learned about scientific analysis of skeletal remains via a most extraordinary specimen: a very ancient, very rare human skeleton originally from the world-famous site of Ur in modern day Iraq, rediscovered in the Museum’s storage.
The students worked alongside professor Janet Monge, curator of physical anthropology at the Museum, and other Museum scholars as they studied the skeleton, learning more about how it was excavated and its place in the ancient history of the Near East.
How the Museum learned about the existence, in storage, of this important skeleton is a story in itself.
In the summer of 2014, Penn Museum scholars made a spectacular “discovery” in the Museum’s basement—a 6,500 year old skeleton from Ur. The specimen had been preserved at the Museum since an expedition in the 1920s and ’30s, but all trace of its identifying documentation was gone. Based on evidence from the Museum’s Ur Digitization Project, Monge knew that a second box without documentation was nearby and in all likelihood contained a second ancient skeleton from the site.
Prior to opening the second box, Monge hoped to X-ray it, but the size and bulk of the box made that problematic, and so the project was put on hold. Finally, earlier this semester, Monge and graduate student and collections assistant Paul Mitchell used a crowbar to open the box and confirm that it was, indeed, the second and final skeleton from Ur.
The skeleton was used in the CAAM class as an introduction to the field of bioarchaeology.
“What do we do when we ‘find’ a new skeleton?” Monge explains. “The students [took] on the challenge of laying out a long-term research project framed around this individual.”
Class members used archival records from the excavation to determine the specimen’s archaeological context and will study the skeleton using technologies such as X-rays, CT scans, and isotopic analysis.
“Together they [explored] the intricacies of skeletal analysis from the ground up and out,” Monge says.
