Adventures in Photography: Expeditions of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and: Guide to the Mesoamerican Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (review)

Over the last 115 years, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has sent over 350 archaeological and anthropological expeditions to distant reaches of the globe in search of knowledge, artifacts, and museum-quality exhibits. These two books, though not intended as a set, are highly complementary. Individually, they serve primarily as visual records of the museum's expeditions and collections. Together, they photographically document the historical role of the museum in archaeology and anthropology, from their early incarnations to the present day, as well as the contributions that have resulted from that continuing dedication to field research.

Adventures in Photography provides anthropologists and interested laypeople with a stunning and almost visceral sense of the history of archaeology and ethnography. The plates are organized in a loosely chronological fashion, beginning with excavations at Nippur, Iraq, in 1895 and continuing through research with Maya potters in Chinautla, Guatemala, in 1975. Although each photograph has intrinsic aesthetic value (and a few are breathtaking), and some may be academically useful to a few specific researchers, their primary utility is in documenting the trajectory of anthropology and archaeology as they have developed into the modern era. Pezzati, archivist for the museum, highlights that sense of disciplinary history as a journey through his choice of plates; the front cover depicts a camel caravan trekking toward the camera, and the final plate shows an archaeological surveyor disappearing into the unknown over an Afghani dune. The accompanying text is briefer than a professional might like, but it outlines the expeditionary history of the museum, broken down geographically and chronologically. One cannot, however, do justice to 350 expeditions in fewer than 15 pages of text, and the accounts are obviously minimal.

If the first book documents the museum's expeditions, the second catalogs a small portion of the more than 1 million artifacts those expeditions have collected. The Guide to the Mesoamerican Gallery is exactly that, a photographic guided tour of the Mesoamerican gallery. As such, the ordering of the book reflects the spatial layout of the gallery, though this is not made explicit in the text. Unfortunately, this means that the artifacts depicted are ordered neither geographically nor chronologically (or even functionally, thematically, or by raw material); while this is partially compensated for by a thorough index, it is nonetheless distracting. The photographs themselves are clear, well lit, and artistically composed, and pictures of Mayan hieroglyphic texts are generally accompanied by line drawings to enhance their legibility. These writings represent a primary focus of the book, with a significant part of the introduction providing a thumbnail reference to Maya epigraphy and a detailed account of the information contained in the museum's collection of texts. Each plate is accompanied by whatever provenance information exists for that item but also by a short account (ranging from a sentence to a brief paragraph) that attempts to contextualize the object within the culture through its function, iconography, or provenance and that sometimes points out the kinds of information archaeologists can obtain from them. Predictably, the artifacts chosen for inclusion are among the visually most impressive but are not necessarily the most informative or best-documented items in the museum's holdings.

Both books are aimed at a museum-going audience of interested laypersons and probably will sell primarily in the museum gift shop. The visual impact of both books is noteworthy, though neither is large...