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Oriental Institute Staff Newsletter October 1999

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Oriental Institute Staff Newsletter October 1999 :r OISN o cd"' IC)C1St 01 NEWSLE'ITER - FIRST MONDAY - OCTOBER 1999 UNITS DIRECTOR'S OFFICE I Gene Gragg COMPUTER LAB I John Sanders MUSEUM I Karen Wilson PUBLICATIONS I Tom Urban RESEARCH ARCHIVES I Chuck Jones PROJECTS AMUQ - TELL KURDU I Aslihan Yener EPIGRAPHIC SURVEY I W. Raymond Johnson HITTITE WORKSHOP I Harry A. Hoffner, Jr. TABLET ROOM I John A. Brinkman TECHNOLOGY DISCUSSION GROUP I Chuck Jones TELL HAMOUKAR IN SYRIA YEMEN PROJECT THE ANCIENT SOCIETIES WORKSHOP NELC INDIVIDUALS ABBAS ALIZADEH STEVEN COLE FRANCOIS GAUDARD ALEXANDRINE GUERIN JAN JOHNSON WALTER KAEGI ALEXANDRA O'BRIEN DENNIS PARDEE ROBERT RITNER JOHN SANDERS DAVIDSCHLOEN OGUZSOYSAL MATTHEW STOLPER EMILY TEETER DAVID TESTEN TOM URBAN +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ UNITS +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ DIRECTOR'S OFFICE I Gene Gragg I would like to welcome students, staff, visitors, and faculty back to what should be a challenging and exciting year for the Oriental Institute. As we head into the new academic year, I am pleased to announce that, by way of recognition of the exceptional contribution to the research effort of the Oriental Institute, Richard Beal and John Sanders have been promoted to Senior Research Associate. Likewise in recognition of his research role in o the Oriental Institute, Chuck Jones adds the title of Research Associate to that of Research Archivist/Bibliographer. There are no faculty comings/goings to report, but we are very happy to have two Visiting Scholars: Alexandrine Guerin is here on a research Fulbright grant. She recently received her doctorate from the Sorbonne; her dissertation deals with archaeological remains of medieval settlement patterns and tribes in southern Syria. She has lived for about 7 years in Damascus and has participated in numerous excavations and surveys in Syria. The other is Dan Selden, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is interested in Hellenistic literature as it relates to the Near East. +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ COMPUTER LAB / John Sanders The most important news from the Computer Lab over the summer and early fall is that we are in the process of setting up the new Lab in Room 202 and the server room on the second floor. Electrical and network wiring was installed in late August, and plastering/painting will be completed in a few days. By this time next month I expect to be in the new facilities, though perhaps still operating out of a few boxes. All the Institute's servers will be housed in their new home, and Norman Golb and I will probably be playing musical offices as we do a switch. The start of the new Fall school year has seen the 01 website exceed 200,000 "hits" per week on a regular basis (4 weeks in a row throughout September). Several new computing facilities and capabilities are in the works as I write this memo, such as moving the Research Archives on-line catalog to a web-based format so that it will be accessible to anyone in the world via the internet. Several new public access computers, both Macintosh and Windows-based, will be available in the new Computer Lab AND in the Archives. I'll report on this further in next months report, as they become available. +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ MUSEUM / Karen Wilson This has been a busy summer for the museum, with 22,000 visitors having passed through our doors since the public opening of the Grimshaw Egyptian Gallery on Memorial Day Weekend. The most common comment encountered in the Visitors' Comment Book has been "We can't wait for the rest of the museum to be open as well." Neither can the museum staff, which is beginning work on planning future reinstallations, as well as getting our daily operation back into shape after the chaos that resulted from the push for the reopening. In August, the museum was awarded a Conservation Project Support grant of $50,000 to purchase storage cabinets for the Persian Collection. This will allow us to get the collection out of its temporary packing boxes and into o cabinets so that objects for the reinstallation of the Persian Gallery can be selected. (A similar grant awarded last year has allowed us to unpack the Megiddo collection with a similar eye toward the process of reinstalling the galleries.) At the end of September, Sara Caspi, the Oriental Institute Museum's first postgraduate Getty conservation intern, completed her 12-month internship. Sara will be assuming her new position as the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution in October. The 1999-2000 intern, Eric Nordgren, began his internship today. Eric is a graduate of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, masters' level archaeological conservation program and has recently completed two years at the National Museum of Beirut, Lebanon. In September, the Museum Education Office was awarded a one-year grant by the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation to present a teacher-training program on ancient Egypt and Nubia for educators who teach about ancient civilizations in the Chicago Public Schools. Anna Rochester will coordinate this program, which will be based on the award-winning curriculum materials th at the museum education department and a panel of Chicago Public School teachers have produced over the past four years, thanks to funding from the Polk Bros. Foundation. The reopening of the Egyptian Gallery and the beginning of the school year has the telephones in the Museum Education Office ringing constantly with requests for guided tours, especially from teachers throughout the metropolitan area who are eager to introduce their students to our collection. Docent-led tours began on September 28th, and it is wonderful to see (and hear) the school children in our galleries once more. +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ PUBLICATIONS 1 Tom Urban First page proofs for Garrison/Root _Seals and Sealings from Persepolis_ (OIP 117) have not yet been returned. At present most of the final page proofs of the Wente festschrift (SAOC 58) have been returned by the authors and the volume should soon go to press. An issue of News & Notes was prepared and published and the 1998/99 Annual Report was prepared and sent to press. Purchase orders were obtained for the typesetting and printing of CAD T and CAD P; samples of cover materials were submitted to Professor Roth for the printing of CAD R and reprinting of CAD S. A joint publication by the Oriental Institute and the University of Ghent, Gasche/Tanret _Changing Watercouses_, appeared. Work began on Carol Meyer's (and others) _Bir Umm Fawakhir 1993 Preli mi nary Report (OIC 28); John and Debbie Darnell's _ Theban Road Rock Inscriptions, Part 1_ (OIC 29); and Emily Teeter's _Scarabs, Scaraboids, Seals, and Seal Impressions from Medinet Habu_ (OIP 118). Simrit Dhesi and Blane Conklin were hired as part-time work study assistants. +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ RESEARCH ARCHIVES / Chuck Jones The renovation project threatened for the end of the summer in the Research Archives was postponed. However, we now have the project bids approved and accepted, and the budget in place so the project can move forward. We are working on the scheduling. Asbestos abatement (luckily there is not very much of this stuff to deal with), will occur on the night of October 4th, requiring us to close at 4PM on that day. We will reopen as usual on Tuesday morning. There has been some disruption of the usual shelving of books in preparation for the project. If you are unable to locate a book let me know. As for the rest of the project, we hope to schedule it in the least inconvenient way possible. There will nevertheless be periods of noise and disruption in the reading room, and there will certainly also be times when we will be closed. With luck we will be able to schedule the closed periods during the winter break. Those of you who are teaching should nevertheless contact the Regenstein Reserve department to make sure teaching materials will be available. Catherine Mardikes assures me that she will help to make sure materials you need are available over there. Feel free to contact her <[email protected]> for assistance. If you have classes including students other than graduate students in NELC, please ask them to identify themselves to me, and inform them that users of this library are expected to reshelve their books. If you have photocopied materials for "reserve", please let me know. All of the public access machines in the Research Archives have been replaced or upgraded. We now have two iMacs and a new Dell PC. Within days we will have a CD-ROM jukebox available on one of the Apples and on the Dell. This will make some of the CD-ROM based resources much more accessible. All of the machines in the Research Archives are connected to the internet. You can read your mail at any of them, via telnet or other utilities. In addition we have a 'public' internet jack for those with a laptop. As mentioned in the COMPUTER LAB report above, we are prepared to have the on-line catalogue make the move from the local network to the Web as soon as the server room and the new computer lab facilities are up and running. Staff in the Research Archives this year includes: Katherine Strange - Second year Islamic archaeology student Jake Lauinger - First year Mesopotamian history student, and o Mark Saathoff - First year Egyptian archaeology student. +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ PROJECTS +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ AMUQ - TELL KURDU 1 Aslihan Yener Tell Kurdu Excavations 1999 The 1999 season at Tell Kurdu (5 August to 15 September 1999) consisted of three large trenches and three smaller trenches dating to the Amuq E (or Ubaid-related, c.
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