Office Artifacts: Megan Kassabaum

Megan Kassabaum’s office in the academic wing of the Penn Museum is, as she puts it, “a bit of a museum in itself. As an archaeologist focused on Native North America and a curator in the Museum’s American Section,” she says, “I take great pride in curating my office as well.” 
 
Kassabaum, an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology, uses the space to show off “miniature ‘exhibits’ dedicated to my fieldwork, my students, my family, my travels, and also turtles (my favorite animal). My most meaningful artifacts are perched among my most used books on these shelves behind my desk.” 
 
Not pictured here are the replicas and souvenirs she has collected visiting archaeological sites around the world; those adorn the shelves and walls of an adjoining room. “Also not pictured,” she adds, “is the garden of succulents and other plants I tend on my window sills—an attempt to bring the outside in (and also to conceal the adjacent parking garage).”

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1) COVID Doodle

COVID was a hard time for all of us, and I found that I could avoid being distracted by the existential crises we were all facing by keeping my hands busy doodling during Zoom meetings. I met my now husband about a month before quarantine began, and one of the first presents he gave me was a set of colorful pens to level-up my doodling. This box once held beers I picked up from a local brewery during the height of the pandemic, but it was quickly repurposed as a laptop stand. It was during this phase of its life that I fully covered it in doodles.  

2) Hog Farm Rd. Street Sign

Far off the beaten path in Jefferson County, Mississippi, sits a dirt road, old enough that its many years of use have cut its banks deep into the Natchez Bluffs. This road is named after the Alcorn State University Swine Development Center, but for me, it is the access road to 1,000 years of Native American history as it leads to four earthen ceremonial mounds constructed and used between AD 400–1200. These mounds have been the focus of my research since 2005. When my dissertation advisor found this downed street sign, he kept it and gave it to me as a graduation present.


3) Replica Pot

I purchased this vessel from [fellow UNC-Chapel Hill alum] Joe Herbert while I was a graduate student there. It is the type of pot in which Native people in North Carolina would have cooked their meals. Thinking about what archaeologists can learn from ceramic artifacts, particularly as they relate to understanding foodways, is a big part of my research. When I got to Penn, I developed a hands-on ceramic analysis class to teach students these methods. As part of this class, students made and fired their own pots. During our outdoor firing, we used Joe’s pot to cook chili for the class. Later, students were able to examine the residue left behind to help them understand what we see in the archaeological record.

4) Underwater Panther Effigy

This is a 3D-printed model of my favorite object in the Penn Museum. This “boatstone” was probably used as a weight on a spear thrower by people in Mississippi more than 1,000 years ago. Though from the same site I excavate on Hog Farm Road (one of the reasons I love it!), this unique artifact was found in the mid-1800s. It is designed to look like an underwater panther, a mythical creature that played an important role in the religion of Native people in the Eastern United States. I put the real object on display the first exhibit I curated at the Penn Museum.


5) Mushroom Lawn Ornament

A fellow archaeologist in Mississippi has a fun habit of hiding amusing presents on the sites her friends are excavating, My first season running a field school for Penn, she hid this ceramic mushroom in one of our units. When we discovered it, it became our mascot—that is, until it was tragically crushed by a falling shovel. Unbeknownst to me, my students collected all of the fragments, and at the end of the season, they presented me with this re-fit and carefully glued mushroom wrapped in an accurately labeled artifact bag. It makes me smile every time I see it.