Inside the Peabody Museum September 2017
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Two Ways of Knowing: Creating Ancient Maya History
Cracking Bones, Gnawing Flesh, and Pondering Hearts
Tales of the Moche Kings and Queens
Fall Program Guide
In Case You Missed It...Harvard's History of Photography Timeline
Monday, September 18, 6:00 pm
Two Ways of Knowing
Creating Ancient Maya History through Inscriptions and Archaeology
Scholars have made significant advances in the interpretation of ancient Maya hieroglyphs in the past forty years. Penn Museum curator Simon Martin discusses how researchers combine texts with the physical remains of archaeological excavations to create and discover history.
2017 Tatiana Proskouriakoff Public Lecture and Reception
Related exhibitions: See more Maya history in Encounters with the Americas and All the World Is Here.
Event details
Tuesday, September 19, 6:00 pm
Cracking Bones, Gnawing Flesh, and Pondering Hearts
Body, Mind, and Medicine in Ancient Mesopotamia
Drawing upon ancient texts and visual representations, medical historian Ulrike Steinert will discuss how categories of “body” and “mind” were construed in Mesopotamia more than three thousand years ago and will consider social aspects of the body at the intersection of cultural norms, ideals, and gender.
Public Lecture
Event details
Tuesday, September 26, 6:00 pm
Tales of the Moche Kings and Queens
Elite Burials from the North Coast of Peru
This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the discovery of the Lord of Sipán, one of the most spectacular gold tombs found in the Americas and the first of many elite tombs found in northern Peru. Peabody Museum director Jeffrey Quilter will share firsthand information about elite burial excavations.
Public Lecture
Related exhibition: See more Moche culture in Moche Ceramics: Deciphering Culture through Art.
Event details
Fall semester
Harvard Museums of Science & Culture Program Guide
See the full fall schedule of events and exhibitions for all four Harvard Museums of Science & Culture (HMSC). The fall HMSC lecture series includes talks on fate and human evolution; the ancient Egyptian tombs of Saqqara; the future of happiness; and the visualization of microbes, and celestial measurement. The use of reliefs in ancient Mesopotamia to commemorate royal triumphs will be part of an exhibit opening at the Harvard Semitic Museum, and rarely seen specimens of diseased fruit, created to help teach Harvard botany students over 100 years ago, will go on display in the Glass Flowers gallery.
In Case You Missed It....
Harvard's History of Photography Timeline
The timeline offers a view into the history of photography through selected photographs in the University’s libraries, museums, and archives, including the Peabody Museum. Harvard holds nearly 10 million photographs that have served as primary source documents for teaching and research in the sciences and humanities since the mid-nineteenth century. The timeline highlights the strengths of Harvard’s collections, which document an encyclopedic range of subjects and include the work of noted nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographers.
Tikal photo by Raymond Ostertag; Moche photo courtesy of Museo Tumbas Reales de Sipán; Joseph T. Zealy (1812-1893, American), Renty, Congo, on plantation of B. F. Taylor, Esq., Columbia, S.C., 1850, quarter-plate daguerreotype, PM 35-5-10/53037. Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology. Copyright President and Fellows of Harvard College.
See what's coming up in the Calendar of Events.