Conserving Ancient Egyptian Artifacts

Good evening everyone. My name is Steve Tinney and I am the Deputy Director of the Penn Museum. Many thanks to all of you for joining tonight's installment of Archaeology in Action, our flagship virtual lecture series featuring Penn Museum's leading researchers and experts. And from now until next June we'll be bringing you first-hand accounts from the forefront of archaeological exploration around the globe. Our next lecture is on Wednesday, November 6th and features Dr Sarah Lynn and Meg Kasselbaum discussing their work right here in the city with a lecture entitled Excavating the Black Bottom by Community Archaeology in West Philadelphia. Now as you follow this evening's presentation I'm sure you'll have questions and you can type them into the chat or the Q&A section and the on-screen moderator will ask your question for you at the end of the talk. So we look forward to your questions. And now to our speaker for tonight, a highly respected and admired colleague of mine, Molly Gleason, the head conservator of the Penn Museum. Molly's career in conservation began at the University of Delaware as an art conservation undergraduate student. She continued her studies as a graduate student in the UCLA Getty program in the conservation of cultural heritage. And as a professional associate of the American Institute for Conservation with over 20 years of experience in the field, Molly has worked in museums and archaeological sites in the United States, Chile, Easter Island and Egypt. Molly's currently pursuing a PhD in the Preservation Studies program at the University of Delaware. Molly has been at the Penn Museum since 2012, and some of you may actually already have met her during some of her times on the open windows in the Artifact Lab gallery that Molly was involved in for many years. More recently, Molly has played a major role in our work to reimagine, redesign and reinstall the entirety of our ancient Egypt and Nubia galleries. And just about a year ago, Molly was promoted to head conservator, a role which makes her responsible for all the conservators and conservation work in the Penn Museum. No pressure. So let's hear now from Molly on Archaeology in Action, conserving ancient Egyptian artifacts. Over to you, Molly. Thanks so much, Steve. And I'm going to make sure I'm in presentation mode here. Hopefully, that looks good to everybody. Hello, thank you so much for joining us this evening. And I'm really happy to be with you to talk about conserving ancient Egyptian artifacts. So the Pyramids of Giza, the Tomb of Nefertari, more than 5000 objects from King Tut's tomb. We're fortunate enough that these wonders from the ancient world still survive, that they can be studied, and they can still be seen for those of us who are lucky enough. And for this, we have the field of archaeology. As part of this Archaeology in Action series and as head conservator here at the Penn Museum, I'm going to be speaking this evening about the survival of this heritage, both the wonders and the challenges, and the active role that conservation plays in both the fields and the museum to ensure the long term preservation of these sites and artifacts. And I'll be focusing on ancient Egyptian heritage. As Steve mentioned, I have been at the Penn Museum for the past 12 years. And most of my time at the museum has been focused exclusively on this part of the collection. And not only is it a significant part of the museum's collection, there's over 50,000 objects from Egypt in our collection from all periods of ancient Egyptian history. But it's also one of the largest collections of Egyptian and Nubian materials in the country. The collection at the Penn Museum was assembled through nearly a century of archaeological research. Much of the pieces were obtained through archaeological excavations in Egypt. And these artifacts come from a wide range of sites. This includes a number of materials. You can see some of the objects from our collection, highlights from our collection, represented here on the screen. This includes architecture, statuary, textiles, papyri, pottery, lots of stone, and funerary objects. And one of the reasons that the Egyptian collection has been such a big focus in my department, in conservation specifically, is because we're currently renovating and preparing for new galleries focused on our ancient Egyptian and Nubian collection. And these galleries, when complete, will contain thousands of artifacts ranging from the tiniest of scarabs and amulets to soaring 30-foot-high sporonic columns. And when we open new galleries, this creates a lot of work for conservation. It's because it's our department's responsibility to ensure, as best as possible, that objects will be clean, stable, protected, and that we've studied them with the new technologies at our disposal, so that they meet the interpretive goals for display, all of which, and all of this work, involves careful research. And in order to meet these goals, and in order to know why the pieces in our collection look the way that they do, we need to understand how they were made, where they come from, and not just geographic location and time period, but also burial environment and their excavation history, as well as the circumstances of collection. So today, I'm going to talk about archaeology in action, but through the eyes and experience of a conservator. I've also had the great privilege to work in the field on archaeological sites, again, including on the Penn Excavations in South Abydos. So while much of what I'll be presenting tonight features projects that have happened right here in Philadelphia, because just like archaeologists, us conservators spend much more time in the lab than the field. Our work, though, in the field, in the lab, in the museum environment, it's essentially the same. It's just often more comfortable and with greater access to tools and equipment than in the field. And I'll also be discussing how our work in the museum lab must be informed by our understanding of site preservation and burial environments and where these objects come from. So just again, as a backdrop to this topic, you know, I think many of you are very aware of the field of archaeology and how it helps us better understand the past and ourselves through the discoveries of sites and artifacts. And while many people think of excavation when they think of archaeology, archaeology involves significant research and interpretation. However, archaeology is also a destructive endeavor. So here are several quotes kind of summing this up about archaeology as organized destruction, excavation as an irreversible process, and talking about minimizing damage. Again, archaeology is a destructive science and the fact that sites can never really be fully recreated exactly the way that they were when they were found. And because of this, we see that our conservation shows up in archaeological codes of ethics. So here we have a few excerpts from the Archaeological Institute of America's Code of Ethics and Professional Standards, just talking about the considerations archaeologists must take when preparing for excavations. And that includes long-term storage and curatorial facilities for finds and the records. So all the data that goes along with that. And also just planning specific plans for conservation and preservation from the onset. And in addition to being destructive sites, excavating artifacts also leads to their destruction if interventions are not taken. So this is a graph that I was shown when I was first introduced to the field of archaeological conservation. And so it shows essentially, you know, what happens to objects when they're buried and over time. So objects are buried and they go through this rapid phase of deterioration. And over time, hopefully they reach an equilibrium with their burial environment. But then that changes when excavation occurs. And then there's this spike in deterioration, rapid deterioration that happens. And this is the point where conservation can and needs to step in to arrest that deterioration so that we don't lose that information and that material heritage completely. But just to kind of hit upon my point about, and also what shows up in the Codes of Ethics, is really, you know, conservation needs to be happening at this early stage because that can also mitigate the damage that does happen during excavation if it is involved at that very first stage. And this is true for archaeological work anywhere. For those of us who have had the opportunity to work on Egyptian cultural heritage, whether that is in the museum or on site, we know how special it is. And, you know, Egypt is known for having excellent preservation of archaeological sites and artifacts. And a lot of this is because of its dry desert environment. Water causes deterioration. So the lack of water aids in preservation. And so because of this dry desert environment, and also because many objects were purposely closed off and sealed off in tombs that were inaccessible, many materials are well preserved that would normally not survive, including, and I've shown some examples here from our collection, but things that we would typically not find from sites that are much more recent. So a papyrus manuscript, a painted wooden funerary mask, a plant fiber basket, and a cartonnage sarcophagus. And all of these materials, some of these materials, even with some deterioration, they look like there's no possible way that they could be as old as they are. So this is what many people think of when they think of ancient Egyptian heritage and preservation. But the reality is, and something that I've learned quite a bit in my time working in the collection and also on site, is that preservation is really quite varied. In Egypt, from very well preserved and pristine sites to artifacts and sites that are almost, if not entirely, deteriorated. And early archaeological focus was often on the most well-preserved sites in Egypt. This includes temples, tombs, royal complexes. And material that was considered to be too deteriorated to remove was often not preserved, often not removed at all from the sites during excavation. There's just two examples of painted wood, both from Abydos, which is a site in Upper Egypt. I'll be talking about the site a little bit more in a second. And this just shows you the extent of degradation that can happen to painted wooden artifacts in the field, especially in certain sites. I've listed some reasons here in the slide, and I will be going into those in a moment. That includes salts, flooding, and vandalism. So early archaeologists acknowledged and wrote about these preservation issues. You see a painting here of Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, often referred to as Flinders Petrie, who is also often credited as the father of Egyptian archaeology. He first went to Egypt in 1881 to do a detailed survey of the Giza pyramids, and he went off to work there for almost 60 years. He excavated for the Egypt Exploration Fund, or the EEF, and that was later the Egypt Exploration Society. And he worked on sites including Abydos, Tell Amarna, Memphis, and Nakata. And Petrie published his work and wrote about his work extensively. And so in his Methods and Aims in Archaeology publication of 1904, Petrie devoted an entire chapter to the preservation of objects. Here you can just see a short excerpt. And despite this early understanding of conservation being integral to archaeology, it's not entirely surprising that conservation is often viewed by many people as a separate discipline entirely, and that it runs parallel to archaeology. The education and training of professionals is very different, and historically conservation has been treated as an afterthought, as expensive. Also, it's something that happens behind closed doors and in basements of museums, and also because of its, you know, expense in the work, reserved for artifacts and sites of special importance. There's also this misunderstanding that conservation is primarily a field concerned with care, while archaeology is primarily concerned with research. These two disciplines, however, are part of the same effort to discover, understand, and preserve the past. We're going to take a closer look at some of the preservation issues by looking at the conditions in Abydos. I mentioned Petrie work there, and it is a site that I've worked at. We have excavations there. Abydos is a site in Upper Egypt. I pointed it out here on the map, and this is also an aerial photograph of the dig house and what the land looks like in Abydos. It's located on the western side of the Nile Valley. It's approximately 500 kilometers south of Cairo. Beginning in the pre-dynastic period, Abydos developed over a period of almost five millennia, from about 4,000 BCE to 1,000 CE, and the site includes temples and structures that expand over eight square kilometers in this low-lying desert, which is adjacent to the Nile floodplain. And as I already mentioned, Petrie was an early excavator in Abydos, and for over 150 years, excavations have yielded extensive architectural features and vast quantity of artifacts made from a variety of materials. Penn has been excavating in Abydos since 1967, when Dr. David O'Connor, who was then curator of our Egyptian section, in collaboration with Yale, initiated the Pennsylvania-Yale University expedition to Abydos. And current archaeological projects at Abydos include our own excavations, Penn's excavations, in south of Abydos, led by Dr. Joseph Wegner. And all of this work is carried out in collaboration with the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities. And despite the dry desert environment, which you can see here, wood and other organic materials that are found in Abydos are often found in particularly fragile condition, and again, this was documented early on by Petrie. Here you can see another excerpt from one of Petrie's publications, and just kind of, again, highlighting how important it is to be concerned about preservation from the moment of excavation. And about Abydos, Petrie frequently described the condition of the wood and the cartonage found there as entirely eaten by white ants or termites, and also so rotted that nothing can be preserved. And we know that Petrie developed techniques for recovering these materials. Often, he often used molten wax. And he, again, acknowledged that the greatest challenge was the preservation and transport of the material once it was removed from the ground. And conservators and archaeologists at Abydos today encounter similar conditions. A significant amount of organic material is found, but it's often so fragile that without immediate intervention, it will not survive retrieval. In archaeology and conservation, there is the standard approach of block lifting fragile material. So that is a technique where you isolate a block of soil, a matrix of soil around an artifact, lift that from the ground, and then you micro-excavate that block back in a more controlled lab setting. But that method of block lifting in Abydos is further complicated by the sandy soil. It shifts around a lot, and it really provides no structural support to artifacts once they're exposed. So once uncovered, these objects are really vulnerable to damage, and it makes quick recovery of these objects really critical to the preservation of the finds. These are images of me working at Abydos, and this is in the tomb of Senebkay, a second intermediate pharaoh. And on the image on the left, I'm working on wall paintings on limestone inside the tomb. Then the image on the right kind of illustrates what that shifting sandy soil can look like. That is a piece of wood, a very degraded wood found inside the burial chamber and likely part of a canopic box. And at this point, I was just kind of figuring out exactly what is our plan going to be for attempting to remove this very fragile piece of wood from the ground as the sand kind of easily moves around it and doesn't really do much to support it. So because of this issue with shifting sand, another technique and material that we often use in Abydos and in other parts of the world is using a volatile binding media called cyclododecane. This is used as a temporary consolidant, and it is used to consolidate fragile wood and other fragile cartonage in the field. So cyclododecane is an organic compound. It has a unique property, which is it's a waxy white solid at room temperature. But as you can see in these images here, it can be melted. So these are images of conservators working in the field with hot plates or over propane tanks. And you can melt the solid cyclododecane into a liquid, and then it can be applied as a liquid to the fragile artifacts carefully or to fragile surfaces. And then it solidifies again in the air. If well sealed, it will stay as a solid on the surface of an object. But once allowed to be in open air, that solid state, cyclododecane, what's really unique about it is that it sublimates. So it moves from that solid state to vapor. So and it really, it leaves behind little to no trace of its presence on the surface. So again, this has been used extensively and tested extensively in Abydos. And this allows objects to be temporarily stabilized, safely lifted, and then moved again to a more controlled lab setting for further stabilization. So it kind of just kicks the problem down the road to another day. So this is just one of the issues that we encounter on site in Abydos. Another issue, preservation issue, is that in addition to these organic materials, we encounter a lot of limestone. And this includes painted and inscribed stela, ritual, and funerary objects. And in many cases, the limestone might look great when it's exposed like this object on the left. And but once it is exposed, it suffers from severe cracking, delaminating, flaking, and powdering, often due to the presence of soluble salts. And then this makes it further susceptible to damage through handling and transportation from the site to the lab. So here you can just see an example of a piece that looks like it's in pretty good shape in the field. And once it's been removed to the lab, it has the surface is spalling, we have some losses and damage. And this is another area where conservation can assist in mitigating damage. And I'll be talking a little bit more about how this shows up in the museum setting as well. Another conservation issue encountered in Abydos is the massive amount of mud brick that has been excavated, much of which is exposed for seasons on end, or in some cases, permanently. So this is an example of the Tomb of Senwosret III, excavated, again, by our South Abydos project. And the exposed mud brick at the entrance to this tomb was extremely vulnerable to damage. So our project received funding from the American Research Center in Egypt's Antiquities Endowment Fund in 2011 to partially reconstruct this mud brick and to build a permanent covering to the tomb as protection. And you can just see some images both outside and then the stairs leading down into the tomb here. This approach of protective coverings or enclosures is often used as a preservation approach once sites are exposed. And a more recent example of this is the Tomb of Senebkay. I showed you a couple images of me working in that tomb. And this is the exterior of it. So this tomb was exposed, work was carried out to stabilize the remains of the tomb itself. But leaving it exposed to the vulnerable to wind, sand, was going to mean, and also fluctuating environment, was going to mean there's going to be a lot of deterioration if this tomb was not protected. So stabilization and treatment was carried out. And then until this permanent structure was built over it, it was temporarily, it was protected and temporarily backfilled for several seasons. Once the structure could be built over it, all the backfill was taken out and then they built this permanent enclosure around it. And so you can just see some images of the exterior and the interior. And then in some cases, you know, I mentioned reburial, in some cases reburial is the preservation option. Objects, sites, may be reburied temporarily or permanently as truly the best preservation measure if there's not good ways to protect or mitigate damage because they've been exposed. So this gives you kind of some insight, a glimpse into what conservation looks like in the field at Abydos. I'll mention that there's also significant work that happens in the dig house. And so here you can just see some images of conservators working in the dig house, working to consolidate, clean, examine, treat, and prepare these objects for long-term storage because they remain in Egypt and many of them go into storage once they're well-documented and excavated. You can see some more images here working on site. So again, hopefully this has given you a glimpse into what conservation looks like in the field on a lot of these preservation challenges. With the objects here at the Penn Museum, we face many similar issues, and I've mentioned this. We see evidence of pest damage. We see water damage issues. We run into issues with salt. And we see issues with previous vandalism. At the museum, we benefit from space, access to technology, but we are challenged by working on these artifacts that were excavated decades, if not a century ago. And we often have to do a bit of digging, no pun intended, to give us a better understanding of what we're seeing. And so for our new Ancient Egypt and Nubia galleries, we are faced with this issue on a regular basis. So I'm going to give you a little sense of that by looking at one of our most monumental projects. It's the Coronation Chapel. These are elements from the Palace of Merneptah. So here you can see an excavation photo from 1915. So these are pieces that were excavated in Memphis in the 1910s by Clarence Fisher. And Fisher was given permission to bring a portion of these finds back to the museum. And in the image on the right, you'll see some of these elements installed in our lower galleries for the opening of the cockswing in 1926. These pieces, these monumental pieces on the palace, however, were intended to go on the upper floor. However, due to issues with floor loading, they had to be exhibited at half height in the lower gallery. That was a compromise that had to be made. So we started looking closely at these massive Coronation Chapel elements. So it consists of two 30-foot-high columns and two 30-foot-high gateway elements, as well as other elements of the palace. And we started looking at them in 2018 while they were still in the lower gallery, before we closed the galleries, knowing that plans were taking shape to renovate the galleries and to display these pieces as they had never been displayed before, except for their original context. Now, these pieces are familiar to, I'm sure, many of you and those of us who work at the museum. But there really had been little work done to truly understand these pieces since they were installed in the 1920s. So curatorial research began to try to better understand the excavation history, as Fisher never published his work on this project. And so informed by and alongside this research, we began to try to better understand these pieces so that we could make decisions about de-installation, so like taking them out of the gallery, treatment, and then reinstallation at full height. And what you're seeing here is some of our initial condition mapping that took place, again, while these pieces were still on display, while the galleries were open. We were noting things like the amount of restoration. And we hadn't really noticed that before, that some of these pieces had been extensively restored. How many fragments were making up these pieces? What were some of the condition issues that we could see? Of course, these are really massive pieces. So we also kind of understood that these pieces, some of them are four foot or six feet in diameter. So what couldn't we see? But, you know, as we started looking closer, we started seeing details like this. And this may be difficult to really understand, but it looks like fabric on the surface of this stone. It's not fabric, it's the stone. So like what's going on here? This is just to outline what I'm talking about. So this is where, you know, this is confusing. It's kind of hard to understand why the stone would look like this. So this is where going back to the excavation records in the field notes, we can find evidence for why this might be. Okay, so here we're going back to what these pieces look like in the field. And if you notice, there's water here on the ground. And looking at Fisher's journals, we can see that he wrote here that the two, these columns and these gateway elements are gradually disintegrating, the lower parts of which get soaked with water every year. And in a few years, they're going to be unrecognizable. Okay, so they're worried about preservation issues there. We knew that these, so what was happening is these stones were getting wet, and this limestone was getting really soft. And then we see this image of these pieces, these massive pieces, the pieces that were being shipped away from the site and coming to Philadelphia, wrapped in cloth and in wooden like barrel structures. So this gives us some insight into why the surface of the stone might look like fabric in areas. And that's because it's very likely these pieces were pretty soft and even possibly wet when they were wrapped with protective cloth when they were leaving the site. And so over time, you know, that made that impression in the stone, which is now the stone's not wet anymore. So the stone just has that fabric impression. The other things that we, this is another example of just something that we noticed, which is kind of interesting. This is the side of one of those gateway elements. And we can see an area that looks darker and a little different. I've outlined it here in a detail on the right. And what we realize is that, so this is a carved face of this gateway element. And this is a mortar on the surface of the stone. Most of the stones don't have any mortar on their surface. So, you know, what's going on here. And this looks like it's an ancient, kind of an original repair or compensation for perhaps a fault in the stone. We can see that the mortar is, was placed on the stone to make a flat surface. And then the carving, the original carving was done directly into the stone and into the mortar. So we know that when these pieces were being fabricated, you know, they were having to work with what they had. And in some cases that required doing some restoration work as they were actually fabricating the palace. So these are the types of things that we take close, pay close attention to, as we are also noting condition issues. So as far as condition issues for these pieces, we started noting details, like I already mentioned, extensive restoration work in plaster. We also are seeing that in cement. And so this blue area here that's highlighted is a large plaster repair. This is a drum that is four feet in diameter, that weighs about 5,000 pounds, that is the lowermost drum in one of these 30 foot high columns. And so we also notice in addition to that restoration, we can see a crack, which I've highlighted in black here. So it doesn't look that dark actually on the piece. We noticed this and it's extending from that big fill, that big plaster fill. So this is a little concerning. Then when we deinstalled these pieces, we lifted it up. We don't often lift these really heavy pieces very high. But in this case, we said, can we lift it high enough so we can see underneath, like what's happening with that crack? And sure enough, in this image, you can see that that crack extends across the entire stone. And this is really concerning as we were planning on stacking these drums up to full height. And this one needed to bear the weight of 25,000 pounds on top of it. So we were concerned again, but this is where we realized we need more information. This is not like a typical object that we process in our labs. How can we have a better understanding? Is this just happening on the surface? Does this crack extend through the entire stone? Can the stone go back on display and do what we want it to do in the new gallery? So in this case, we partnered with a firm called Olson Engineering to do some non-invasive studies of the stones. This included ultrasonic pulse velocity and impact echo testing. These tests revealed that the stone was, these cracks were actually, in this case of this particular stone, not going to compromise its ability to bear that weight and the compression of the stone above it. But for extra security, we discussed this further with our structural engineers, Simpson, Gumpertz, and Hegar. This is a firm we're working with closely for these galleries. And determined that a compressive strap that will go around the outside of the stone for display, which will be just extra security to ensure that their compressive forces are not going to cause any issues to expand that crack. This image here shows that same drum with the crack that goes through it, but with an epoxy resin and carbon fiber strap. This is just a prototype and we're working closely right now with our engineers to develop the design for this and for mechanical testing to make sure that it will perform as we want it to. So ultimately, these pieces are going to be stacked to full height in the galleries. And this is an early gallery rendering, just to give you a sense of their monumentality. Here you can see some images of our team working on various parts of the Coronation Chapel. And another image of the team working in our off-site facility. And then in this case, testing out a brand new compression lifting rig, which allows us to do lifting of these pieces as part of the conservation work. Again, 5,000 pounds is not something that we can lift on our own without specialized equipment. And so these are some of our team members who do that, are concentrating on that work on our off-site space. Okay, so that's a deep dive into the work that we're doing for the large stone architectural element for the new galleries. But let me return to some of our smaller artifacts and some of the preservation issues that I've already mentioned that we see in the field that I saw myself in Abydos, and how they show up in the conservation lab at the museum. So I mentioned, and I already showed an image of some badly damaged archaeological wood. So here we have examples of some objects from our collection at the museum. And all of these objects are actually from Abydos, but they were excavated a long time ago. The image on the shows fragments of a painted wooden coffin, and the images on the right are fragments of a painted wooden statues. So archaeological wood, as I mentioned, from Abydos can often be, so actually I misspoke, sorry. The coffin is from Abydos, but the heads are from another site, but also from a similar part of Egypt. So these two heads were actually also discovered by Petrie in Dendera in 1898. They date to the sixth dynasty. And here's just a little blurb that was with these objects when they came out of storage, when they came into the lab. And a note from Petrie's own notes, which is that these were two wooden statuettes, and that they were nearly consumed by white ants. Again, we're referring to termites here, and in this case, just like we were seeing in recent excavations in Abydos, this was happening in similar sites in Dendera. And there's at least eight species of termites in Egypt, and they are found in abundance in these sites. So when these heads came to the lab, we didn't really know what we were looking at. They looked pretty strange. A lot of their surface was gone. There was a lot of evidence of that termite damage. They also looked very waxy. And so this is, again, where we can connect what we know about the excavator, their site, excavation history, to understand better why they look the way that they do. And I did mention that Petrie used molten wax. And in fact, we know that he specifically used paraffin to help preserve objects like this when he found them. So that's useful. So going forward, sometimes conservation work does not result in very significant changes in how things look. So here's examples of some details of one of the eyes of this statuette before and after treatment. And you can see, being able to identify that there was paraffin on this object, the conservation treatment involved reducing the wax as much as possible, and which revealed some more of the painted surface. And also, it revealed more of these beautiful inlaid eyes that are made of hippo ivory, copper, and glass. The black is glass. And the cleaning also revealed more details of this carved wig. You can see in the image on the right, some vertical lines depicting that wig, and even little bits of blue paint. So this wasn't a dramatic before and after, but definitely gives us a better understanding of this piece and why it looks the way that it does. And we learned a lot more about how these pieces may have looked originally because of the conservation treatment. Besides pest activity, and seeing evidence of that in our collection from sites, we also see evidence of vandalism. And vandalism has been happening in sites and tombs in Egypt since ancient times, and it continues to the present day. So this is an example of a stone sarcophagus lid that belonged to a man named Happyman. It was on display in our galleries for nearly a century. And it was excavated in Abydos, by Petrie, in 1902. And as long as we have known of it, it's been on display flat. So like on its back in the gallery, you can see an image here of it being de-installed in our Upper Egyptian Gallery last year, and just an overall shot of it. And we could see when we de-installed it, it had a lot of damage to the upper half, around the shoulders and the face. And so we went back to the records, and we can see, again, Petrie noting that he found this tomb already broken into and partially looted. And he noted that the sarcophagus was broken into. And so this damage had already occurred when it was found. The plans for the new galleries are to display the sarcophagus upright. So our examinations after de-installation revealed that these old repairs that were made, we're not sure when they were made post-excavation, they were failing. This is not uncommon when repairs were done over a century ago. And so conservation for this piece is required, reversing these old joints, cleaning them, and then working to rebuild and fill in the damaged area. And so here, you can see some more shots of another custom lifting rig. And then that piece, it's being actively worked on in an upright position in the museum. Another preservation issue that I've mentioned, again, we encounter in Egypt and in our collection is salt. So salts often accumulate in desert soils from the rise and fall of groundwater. And we have, while we have many well-preserved ceramics and stone objects in our collection, you can see some well-preserved objects in the image on the left, we also have a lot of ceramics and stone in our collection that are affected by salts. And on the right, you can see a detail of image of salts crystallizing on the surface of the ceramic. In this case, we're talking about soluble salts, which can be sneaky, because they work their way into porous materials, and they can lie dormant until there's a change in the environment, specifically in the relative humidity. You can see that illustrated in this graphic on the left, where these salts are in the when there's moisture in the air, and this is known as deliquescent. So these salts can kind of move through the body of a ceramic. And they sometimes may crystallize on the surface, like you see here on the right. But sometimes they also crystallize below the surface, and they push the surface off, and it causes the surface of the object to fall off, and in some cases can completely cause an object to crumble. Petrie encountered this in the field as well. And in this case, this is just another quote from one of his publications, and he's talking about this in this case on stone objects, but if there's the faintest taste of salt, it should be laid to dry face down on the ground. He's seen a fine block of sculpture entirely destroyed by being left for a single day face upward. Once it is dry, it is safe in Egypt, but if it comes to a damp country or city like Philadelphia, it may begin a course of slow destruction. He also talks about sculptures that have been entirely wrecked by being cemented into walls of a museum, because the wet of the cement brings the salt to the to the face of the object. So he talks about methods for removing salt from objects by soaking in water. And just in the images on the right, you can see us actively doing this same process. I mean, the technology has changed a little bit, but it's essentially we can soak the salts out by soaking objects with soluble salts in water baths. But we can't always soak objects. It's not safe for all objects. So for instance, this is part of a wall painting from the Ramesseum. It dates to the third intermediate period. And it's been in our collection for over 100 years. It was displayed for decades, kind of embedded into one of the walls in the Lower Egyptian Gallery, and a previous treatment involved embedding it in plaster. When we started looking at it, we could see salt crystals on the surface. It's hard to see, but the image on the right is showing a powdery painted surface. And in the right light, you can see the salt crystals, they glisten. You know, this is not good. But this piece also can't be soaked in water, especially because of that painted surface. However, conservation treatment is addressing this by removing that embedded plaster that's surrounding it, that restoration plaster from the stone, in the hopes that it will also improve airflow. And we may need to take other methods to desalinate this piece, but it won't be through soaking. So this is, again, an active treatment underway for the galleries. Another issue we encounter is disassociation. And this happens both in the field and in the museum. And this can be referred to objects that become disassociated with their context. So not knowing where something came from. But it also involves pieces that become separated from each other, pieces of an object. So one example is this limestone statue of a man named Mary Ma'at. It's from Thebes. It dates to the late 19th, 18th dynasty. This piece was restored decades ago. So for a long time looked like it did on the left. As a single statue. But during, when it came into the lab because it was selected for treatment for the new galleries, our curators identified that we have more to this piece. In fact, we have like this lumpy looking portion and then this text portion that you can see just to the right of the restored piece. And in fact, that lumpy looking piece, it's not a very nice way to refer to her, but that is part of Mary Ma'at's wife. And so this old restoration really doesn't properly reflect what this piece is. So it's really kind of a typical, more like what we would call an art museum approach. Certainly an older style approach to restoration conservation. So it makes this piece look good, but it doesn't really represent it or its full story. So conservation treatment involved removing that old restoration and reuniting Mary Ma'at with his wife. And so, and we're not filling in anymore because we don't have evidence for what exactly what she would have looked like. But a lot of research went into a proper placement of at least what remains of her for the new galleries. We also had disassociation issues with this Ptolemaic funerary mask. This is of an unknown woman. This piece came into the collection in the 1890s as a gift. And when it came to the lab again for treatment for these new galleries, the eyes were missing. This piece had also become disassociated with its original accession number. So it had been assigned a temporary tracking number. And conservation treatment removed some old restoration materials and revealed the actual original accession number of this object. So during treatment, they also, we were able to reunite the mask with these two inlaid, these pieces of inlaid eyes. These eyes were still being tracked by that original number. And they, these pieces have just become separated in storage. So you can see the final treatment, the after treatment image on the right with those inlays and eyes reunited, which is much better for this piece. So I'll say, you know, I've talked a lot about treatment. Our work is not limited to conservation treatment to treatment. And as I mentioned, many times, you know, we do a lot of research. So I'm just going to give you a few examples, quick examples of what that research looks like. For instance, these are some cartonnage funerary masks, some of which are going into the new gallery, some of which were not. But as we were looking at the ones that are going into the gallery, our conservators noticed what seemed to be kind of an odd gray color to the faces of these pieces. And there wasn't really a good explanation for this. After extensive analysis and imaging, our team discovered that these faces are really made with tin leaf. And they were originally coated to make them either look like a metallic gold or silver. This doesn't change how we treat them. But this is the first discovery of the use of tin leaf in Egypt on funerary masks like this. So this is an exciting discovery. It also just informs again, you know, how we interpret these pieces to the public when they go into the galleries, how would they originally have looked. So that's an ongoing project. Another research project is characterizing these inlays on the Merneptah Palace stone. These, there are inlays in the stonework. And you can see a detail of the inlay on the right. It was noted by archaeologist Clarence Fisher, but it was never really studied once these came to the museum. And so to better understand this material, we partnered with the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials, or CAM, and we, to analyze cross sections of some of the broken pieces of faience that had come from the Merneptah Palace. And we solidly identified this inlay as Egyptian faience. And we are also able to tell that this would originally have been a blue color, which really would have stood out in great contrast to the whiter, you know, grayer stone, limestone. So we carry out other types of research as well, other than just identifying material on objects. For instance, this is a Roman funerary portrait that came in to the collection, again, as a purchase early on. And based on our imaging, we identified that we used UV examination and could identify that Matter Lake is likely the colorant in parts of this funerary mass. This is notable to us because Matter Lake is a particularly light sensitive colorant. And that is concerning to us because when pieces go on display, we need light to display them, and we want to prevent light damage. So we partnered to better understand what can we expect when we put this piece on display? What can the light levels be? We partnered with Yale and to do microfading testing. This is a technique that is used essentially to do accelerated light aging in a very microscopic area on an object. And it's to see how that object, the color is going to change based on the amount of light that it receives. And this color change, this tiny color change, which again, I'm pointing out as a sample here on this pink strip, a tiny little spot, how that spot and that information that we collect can be used to predict color change over time, in real time. So based on this research, we were able to compare it to known standards that we use to understand fading. We use these blue wool standards. And these are different types of textiles with different types of dyes, some of which are very light sensitive and some of which are very light fast. And we can compare how these colorants compare to these blue wool standards. And based on these microfading testing, we were able to determine that that matter, that red matter, matter lake, is moderately light sensitive. And so that means that we can accurately predict when we might see a color change. And so that impacts our decisions about how we display this piece in the galleries. A final example of the research that we carry out is just, we also test the materials that we use. So we use a lot of adhesives. We use a lot of modern materials in conserving the collection. And in order to understand how the materials we use are going to age over time, you know, of course we don't want those things to be causing more damage, we carry out testing. And so in the case for these galleries, we've done a lot of collaborative work with our partners at Penn, including Historic Preservation and the Laboratory for the Research and Structure of Matter. And these are just some images of some accelerated aging tests and us in the lab doing mechanical testing of materials. So I hope that this overview of our work here at Penn, both in the field and preparing for our new Egyptian galleries, has helped provide a better understanding of what conservation in action looks like, and how varied it can be. The care of archaeological objects begins with decisions made in the field and extends for decades or centuries after objects enter museums and collections. While we do spend a good amount of time at the bench in the lab and working on projects and galleries, we also do a wide range of consultation, collaboration, and research to make decisions about how we care for, interpret, and understand this material culture, how it was used, and the people who make and use these objects. And the truth is the work is really never done. But the work we're doing now will allow us to display these objects and tell their stories in ways that we have never done and we wouldn't have been able to do in the past. We can also be certain that there will always be more to learn in the future as technologies continue to change and we continue to build on the knowledge that we have. So with that, I will say thank you so much. And I also just want to say that the work that I presented here today represents the efforts, I mean, I hope it's obvious, of many colleagues and not just our department, many museum colleagues, and as well as colleagues within Penn and outside of Penn. And so truly monumental and collaborative effort.