Exhibits

Tours Available at Bryn Mawr Libraries for SLA

SLA Holiday Party attendees are invited to participate in a guided tour of these exhibits from 5:00 - 6:00pm.  Register separately on the Registration form.  Space for the guided tour is limited to 25. 

Attendees may also do a self-guided tour between 5:30 and 6:30.   Eric Pumroy, Director of Library Collections (and spouse of member Ann Koopman!), will graciously be on hand until 6:30 to show and speak about special treasures of the collection for those who wander by until 6:30 pm.

Mariam Coffin Canaday Library

Breaking Ground, Breaking Tradition: Bryn Mawr and the First Generations of Women Archaeologists

September 25, 2007- December 21, 2007

Open 9:00 - 4:30 Monday - Friday; 1-5 on weekends except for holidays and academic break weekends.

The exhibition focuses on a remarkable group of women who trained at Bryn Mawr at a time when archaeology was still a very young, very male-dominated discipline. Among the women featured are Edith Hall Dohan, Ph.D. 1906, and Hetty Goldman, A.B. 1903, two of the first women to lead field excavations; and Dorothy Burr Thompson, Virginia Grace and Lucy Shoe Meritt, all of whom graduated from Bryn Mawr in the 1920s, earned Bryn Mawr Ph.D.s in the early 1930s, and conducted ground-breaking research that transformed the study of the classical world and established them as among the leading archaeologists of their generation.

The exhibition features historical photographs, many of them from the personal collections of Lucy Shoe Meritt and Dorothy Burr Thompson; watercolors by the excavation's painter, Piet de Jong, of ceramics found during Hetty Goldman's excavations at Tarsus in the 1930s; teaching aids used in early archaeology courses; and antiquities donated to the College by early faculty and students. The curator of the exhibition is Megan Risse, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology whose academic work focuses on the archaeology of Pre-Islamic Arabia and Iran.

Shifting Sands: Roman Glass in the Bryn Mawr College Art and Archaeology Collections

Kaiser Reading Room, during regular library hours. The exhibition will run through January 2008.

Drawn from the College's extensive holdings of ancient glass, Shifting Sands: Roman Glass in the Bryn Mawr College Art and Archaeology Collections is organized around the theme of change. The invention of glass blowing at the end of the first century B.C.E. revolutionized the art of glass manufacture, turning glass from an elite luxury item into an everyday commodity for the masses. Shifting Sands traces the evolution of glass-forming techniques from the second millennium B.C.E. to the late Roman period and showcases the wide variety of uses to which glass was put in the Roman world. The exhibition also explores change in another respect. Much ancient glass is altered in its physical appearance over time, often as a result of natural deterioration but sometimes as a result of modern restoration and conservation attempts. The process by which ancient glass acquires its iridescence is explained and the recent conservation of one of the Collections' own vessels documented.