Making the most of a skeleton in Penn's basement
The students leaned in for a better look at their subject - a flattened skeleton, curled up and encased in a brown gunk of dirt and wax.
The students leaned in for a better look at their subject - a flattened skeleton, curled up and encased in a brown gunk of dirt and wax.
"I've never been this up close and personal with something . . . that old," said Carly Sokach, 21, a University of Pennsylvania senior.
That's 5,300 years old.
The skeleton was excavated from a 50-foot pit in Iraq in 1930, packed in a crate and shipped to the Penn Museum.
Not much more was known about it. For decades, the skeleton had rested in obscurity, with no paperwork to explain its provenance.
Sokach and her classmates are spending this semester digging into the artifact's history, and learning right along with museum scholars.
"We've asked students to use what they learned theoretically and apply it to this case," said professor Janet Monge, the curator of physical anthropology.
The skeleton, believed to be from the ancient land of Ur, first came to the attention of museum scholars last summer when they were digitizing old excavation records from a 1922-34 expedition. They found a record that they strongly suspected matched the unopened crate in their basement.
But they weren't sure until they cracked the box with a crowbar last week and saw their suspicions confirmed: The rarity was packed in dirt and wax to keep the bones intact. Students got their first look last week when their professors took X-rays to determine the skeleton's sex - results were inconclusive.
In the class, called "Living World in Archaeological Science," students will try to determine if it was a man or woman, how old the person was at death, whether any trauma was suffered, and what can be learned about its life, such as its diet.
More X-rays, possibly CAT scans, basic observation, research, and DNA analysis will help tell its story.
That's the sort of hands-on learning the museum envisioned when it opened its Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials last fall.
The Ur skeleton, however, wasn't what Kamillia Scott, a 21-year-old junior majoring in classical studies, envisioned.
"At first I didn't really know what I was looking at," said the Kansas City native who works in the museum archives. "I was like, all right, there's this mash-up of bones and brown gunky stuff." But then "you could see the body taking shape."
It's the first time that a class of mostly undergraduates at Penn is getting the opportunity to work with such an ancient and unexplored find. Such research typically was done only by grad students, said William "Brad" Hafford, the Penn researcher who oversaw the Ur digital project.
"And it usually was on an individual and advanced basis," he said. "Now, we're reaching a greater community and hopefully getting them interested in archaeological science."
The skeleton isn't the first that Penn has found - or rediscovered - in its basement. Monge knew the museum had another very old skeleton in its possession for years. That had been opened, but it, too, had no accompanying paperwork.
The digital project uncovered a record that said the museum should have two skeletons from Ur: one supine, the other flexed.
Monge knew at once she had the first. And she suspected the second could be found in the unopened crate.
But she decided to wait to open the wooden box until the new labs were ready and the students could have the joy of discovery.
The students will compare the skeletons - their teeth, the positions in which they have spent the last several thousand years.
Later in the semester, professors will take a sample from the curled skeleton for DNA analysis - a project that was approved by the museum's scientific testing committee.
Some results won't be available for several years, long after students have graduated.
But Sokach, a premed major from West Pittston, Luzerne County, is still excited.
"It's phenomenal," she said.
She has decided to delve into the skeleton's diet.
Shortly after class began, Monge called students up front to examine the skeleton, laid out on a burlap bag.
"I want you to find the teeth on this," she said.
"You got it," she told a student who pointed to what appeared to be a molar - one that Monge suspects belongs to an adult, maybe 40 to 50 years old.
She also thinks the bones are female, based on size.
But confirmation would have to wait for another day.
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