From the Archives #46 — September 2019 – The Kelsey Blog

https://kelsey-museum.blog/2019/09/24/from-the-archives-46-september-2019/
On 09/24/2019 06:00 AM, leschram wrote:

By Sebastián Encina, Collections Manager

This September, researchers from the University of Lecce (Italy) working at the site of Dimé (Soknopaiou Nesos) in Egypt visited the Kelsey Museum. Professor Paola Davoli and team (Bruno Bazzani, Stefania Alfarano, Clementina Caputo) returned to work with the collections from Michigan's excavations at Dimé in 1931. On this visit, the researchers spent two weeks measuring, drawing, photographing, and studying artifacts from the site. They looked at furniture, beads, sandals, lithics, sculpture, figurines, and a number of other artifact types.

This was the team's second time in Ann Arbor to work with materials from Dimé. In 2017, Davoli and team visited the Kelsey to look through the archival materials from the excavation. This includes maps, drawings, photographs, and other files that help the current Dimé project better understand work undertaken at the site previously. At that time, Professor Arthur Verhoogt hired two Michigan undergraduates, Bianca Gallina and Josiah Olah, to digitize the Dimé archives to assist the Lecce team's work. Bianca and Josiah helped the Kelsey organize, identify, catalog, and digitize a great number of items from the archives, which will prove to be beneficial for years to come.

For this month's "From the Archives," we present a taste of the work Bianca and Josiah accomplished. Like in Karanis, the Dimé excavation team took detailed notes of the architecture at the site, noting topographic measurements. While there were many drawings made, we present those of an oven found at the site, in house I 107. Ovens were not rare at the sites, but not every home had one. With these drawings, we learn the basic construction of a Roman-era Egyptian oven, its size, and potential uses. We also see the handiwork of the person who, in 1931, drew this for their own research and also for those who followed. 

Though Michigan's excavation at Dimé occurred back in 1931, the work still has plenty to inform research today. The Dimé team from Lecce continues to mine the Kelsey archives for information, and plenty of other researchers will use this material for other projects. We don't know yet what those requests will look like, so we do our best to protect this collection and make it accessible to all who want to use it.

Below: Drawings of features from House I 107 in Dimé (Soknapaiou Nesos), Egypt.

--   Sent from my Linux system.