Unearthed in the Archives at the Penn Museum

The archives are the institutional memory of Penn Museum, where 127 years of historical and scientific records are preserved, organized, interpreted, and made available to the public, by appointment. Many of the items held in the archive are themselves artifacts, and for an hour every Friday afternoon, Archivist Alessandro Pezzati extracts a treasure and tells its story.

Forgotten treasures found

With a history that extends from 1887 and participation in more than 300 worldwide explorations to its credit, Penn Museum is a portal to ancient worlds. The galleries display just a fraction of the collection, and even the archives have to store overflow material in the museum basement, which has become something of an archaeological site it its own right. Literally.

This summer, a 6,500-year-old human skeleton that had been stored and forgotten in the basement turned up in the process of digitizing material relating to Iraq’s Royal Cemetery of Ur. Though not an archive project, Pezzati explains, “The discovery was made by consulting records in the archives — we often rediscover items. For example, we recently found a photograph from our excavations with the Oriental Institute at Nippur, Iraq, in 1950 that shows [mystery author] Agatha Christie and her husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, visiting the site.”

The archives include 2,000 linear feet of records and about a million images covering, Pezzati says, “the history of the museum, the documentation of the object collections, and the records of the field research. [There are] letters and memoranda, field notes, catalogs and object ledgers, notebooks, journals, diaries, drawings, maps, plans, photographs, digital files, and motion picture films.”

Archaeologists are meticulous notetakers, so when the archive was formally established in 1979, there was a vast amount of material to be organized — 92 years' worth. “The archive was created with a backlog, and it will always have one,” Pezzati says, “but we have been scanning many of our images on demand, through patron requests from all over the world. The material to be digitized needs to be fully processed and cataloged before it can be scanned. Digitization will take years.”

Unearthed in the archives

Though the items featured on Fridays are lower key than the skeleton in the basement, they are fascinating. The archive is set off from the display areas of the museum, down a long hallway behind stately wrought iron gates. The cavernous room is lined with two levels of shelves accessible by catwalk. There are cabinets for cards and files, with neat stacks of document boxes and cardboard tubes everywhere. At the center stands a long wooden table furnished with reading lamps. Formerly a library, the setting might have been lifted out of a 19th-century British novel. Phileas Fogg, the intrepid traveler of Around the World in Eighty Days, or Christie’s sleuth Hercule Poirot would fit right in here.

Unearthed in the Archives lasts an hour and often attracts museum staff, who drop in to see what anonymous treasure Pezzati has chosen. Recently, he displayed and discussed a group of 19th-century photographs from the Silk Road, the storied land route linking Asia and southern Europe.

Rare Silk Road photos

Taken in the 1880s and 1890s, the 30 albumen prints depict musicians playing drums, string instruments, and impossibly long horns. There were also shots of buildings, including the mausoleum of the 14th-century conqueror Tamerlane. Opening a series of protective folders, Pezzati withdrew brown-toned images inscribed “Bolojinsky, Tashkent,” on the front. Then he turned them over to reveal “Bolojinsky,” written with a flourish. All that is known of the photographer is that he had a studio in the Uzbekistan city of Tashkent.

The period was the golden age of documentary photography, Pezzati explained. Postcards of faraway places were not yet being produced, so travelers paid handsomely for photographs to take home and had portraits made in exotic settings. On-location photography was cumbersome because the process still required heavy glass plates, boxy cameras balanced on tall tripods, and drapes to shroud the photographer as he worked.

Complex provenance

The stories of how they came to the museum are as interesting as the objects Pezzati shows. The Silk Road photographs were purchased at the 1896 Pan-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition in what is now Gorki. Zelia Nuttall, an American archaeologist, was Penn’s representative to the exposition and to the May 1896 coronation of Czar Nicholas II and Czarina Alexandra in Moscow.

Nuttall, a friend of a Penn board member, was an expert in pre-Columbian cultures in Mexico and spoke several languages, including some Russian. Penn Museum was offered a ticket to the coronation and accommodations in Moscow by the mother of William Randolph Hearst, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, who was unable to attend. So Nuttall went to the coronation and Pan-Russian exhibition, purchasing more than 400 items for the museum, including the Silk Road photographs and coronation memorabilia.

With the group’s interest piqued, Pezzati obligingly produced some of the coronation souvenirs, color lithographs of the royal festivities, given to the museum by Nuttall in appreciation.

The photos and lithographs transported visitors into a time in which travel was a luxury, documents were handwritten, and photographs were rare. Crowded with surprises, the Penn Museum Archives are for the armchair archaeologist what the tomb of Tutankhamun was for Howard Carter, just cooler, closer to home, and without a curse.