Museum Fieldwork: Cheshmeh Ali
Semester: Spring 2024
Faculty Advisor: Jennie Bradbury
Field Site: Penn Museum
Field Supervisor: Katy Blanchard
Praxis Poster:
Della_Burke_Poster_Final_SP24
Further Context:
This semester, I interned with Katy Blanchard, the Keeper of the Near East Collections at the Penn Museum. In consultation with my faculty advisor, Dr. Jennie Bradbury, I elected to work with ceramic material – vessels and sherds, fragments of pottery – from Cheshmeh Ali, a site in Iran’s Tehran Plain. This site dates to the Transitional Chalcolithic Period (c. 5300-4300 BCE) and is adjacent to the Islamic site of Rayy. Both sites were excavated by the Penn Museum in the 1930s under the direction of Erich Schmidt. The material brought back to Penn has remained largely unphotographed and digitally inaccessible.
In my preliminary research before the semester, I realized that scholarship on Cheshmeh Ali is limited, which made the site and material even more appealing, as my work in the museum would expand the accessibility of Cheshmeh Ali’s material culture.
In the Near East Collections, my responsibilities were primarily inventory and photography. For the first two weeks of my internship, I cross-checked object IDs and field numbers and photographed the complete vessels to ensure they were all accurately recorded and represented in Penn’s digital collections. After that, I labeled, re-bagged, and returned them to the shelves. I worked with boxes of sherds from the site for the rest of the semester. The size of the boxes was often misleading, as many had more sherds (around 200) than I expected! For the sherds, I carried out an inventory, including cross-checking numbers and writing descriptions of the sherds, and photography. Outside of the Collections, I input my data and descriptions into spreadsheets so Penn’s electronic database is up-to-date. Then, my images are added to Penn’s online collections, and the Cheshmeh Ali material is accessible to researchers and visitors of the digital collections!
In addition to my internship, I’ve worked under the guidance of Dr. Jennie Bradbury, and my research centers on visual analysis of the Cheshmeh Ali material. Through my work with the material and review of scholarship and ceramic material from comparative sites (e.g. Kara Tepe and Tepe Pardis) I’ve been investigating three questions: What are the interactions between motif and vessel/sherd form? Is there a shared vocabulary of motifs and forms across sites from the Transitional Chalcolithic Period? And, considering these, what can I deduce about social complexity? For my final project, I am playing with digital scholarship by creating a Scalar “book” to communicate my findings.
I am grateful for the opportunity to work so closely with the Cheshmeh Ali material and my two advisors, Katy and Jennie. The Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology and practical experiences, like the Praxis Program, informed my decision to choose Bryn Mawr. I am thankful I was able to combine the two and contribute to increasing accessibility in museums and archaeology!