Remains of the day

Since receiving her master’s degree in art conservation at UD in 1986, Vicki Cassman has been working with old people—very old people.

The archaeologist, who specializes in conservation of human remains and textiles, has worked with the 9,000-year-old Kennewick Man of Washington state, the 3-million-year-old hominid skeleton dubbed “Lucy” found in Ethiopia and the remains of mummies from 8000 B.C. found in textile bundles in the Arica Valley of Chile.

Her role ranges from making travel arrangements for Lucy to assuring that Kennewick Man is safely stored and properly sampled and determining the types of dyes used in the textile bundles that wrapped the early Chilean ancestors.

Lucy is Cassman’s latest project. In January, the assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in UD’s art conservation department traveled to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. There, she joined conservator Nancy Odegaard of the University of Arizona and private conservator Ronald Harvey in documenting and preparing Lucy for an exhibition in the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

Titled “Lucy’s Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia,” the Texas exhibition will feature current scientific theories about human evolution and Ethiopian history. Opening in August, the exhibit will include ceramics, jewelry, clothing, sculpture, basketry and hominid and faunal remains. Proceeds of the Lucy exhibit will go to help the National Museum in Ethiopia care for its wide range of collections, including the fossils.

The conservators spent three days with Lucy, photographing and examining each fragment and finding the original numbers associated with them for inventory and tracking.

Lucy, or Australopithecus afarensi, is the most complete skeleton of an early hominoid to date. She was bipedal, meaning she could walk upright like modern humans, and resembled a chimpanzee from the neck up and a modern human from the
neck down.

While Lucy is no longer the oldest human remain nor the missing link in human evolution, Cassman says she remains of interest due to the completeness of her skeleton and the rarity of early hominid ancestors. Her discovery sparked controversy in the 1970s, when she challenged the hominid tree as it was known then.

Cassman says much time was spent debating how Lucy should travel and be exhibited. “Even the taxi driver in Addis Ababa has an opinion about Lucy,” she says. “Lucy truly is a national treasure, and there is such recognition of her importance.”

While some scientists were initially opposed to Lucy leaving the country, Cassman says a compromise eventually was reached.

“Paleoanthropologists working in Ethiopia did express opposition about the exhibit, but they also understood there was potentially a lot of good to come from the exhibit for the museums of Ethiopia and for teaching the general public about hominid evolution,” Cassman says, adding that Lucy’s safety and security was everyone’s primary concern.

The team now is creating condition reports for the fragments that will go along with Lucy on exhibit and will aid in monitoring her condition during the tour.
Cassman says only a limited number of conservators also are anthropologists. “I did not seek to be a conservator of human remains,” she says. “There was a need, and both Dr. Odegaard and I filled that need due to our training, circumstances, past experiences and a willingness to tackle the often complex ethical issues involved.”

To prepare for her trip, Cassman worked with a cast of Lucy in the anthropology laboratory in UD’s John Munroe Hall, which contains fossil casts from all over the world. More than 15 years ago, Karen Rosenberg, chairperson and associate professor of anthropology, bought the cast to use as a teaching aid.
Having a cast to work with before her trip gave Cassman ideas about proper housing materials for Lucy and accelerated her transition into the assignment once she arrived in Ethiopia, she says.

Her interest in human remains originated with her work in textiles. As an undergraduate, she studied weaving and conservation techniques in Sweden, where a museum director told her that if she wanted to pursue restoration, she had to go to the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation.

After graduating from the University of California at Davis in 1982, Cassman came to UD as a fellow in the art conservation graduate program and says she became fascinated with archaeology in northern Chile. Because human remains were included around the textiles found there, she began to study the area.

“It was rare you found a textile without something else included,” she says. “I realized that there was very little that was being done with human remains in terms of conservation. It became something I needed to do because there was so little information available.”

Since her first year at UD, Cassman has traveled to Chile every other summer and has looked at mummies dating from 6000 B.C. to A.D. 1400. This year, she says she will research bundles that were artificially mummified and wrapped in reeds from a local river. Many of the bundles are buried at specific burial sites and in groups.

Cassman completed her doctoral dissertation at Arizona State University in 1997 and then taught museum studies and general anthropology at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, returning to UD in September as the director of undergraduate studies in art conservation.

Lucy and the mummy bundles are just two of her projects. She and Odegaard also have traveled to the Burke Museum at the University of Washington twice a year since 1998 to conduct assessments and to report to a judge on the condition of the Kennewick Man, Paleo-Indian remains discovered in Washington state in 1996. Cassman and Odegaard work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Mandatory Center of Expertise for the Curation and Management of Archaeological Collections to make sure the remains are well-preserved and that all samples are taken with sensitive tools and methods.
Cassman says she likes the challenge of working in a field—curation—that is not widely known.

“It’s an area of conservation that not too many people have looked into, and that always makes it intriguing,” she says. “There are so many needs. No one has taught anthropologists really about curation; it’s not part of the curriculum for anthropology. Because of that, we have an archaeology curation crisis in this country.”

Archaeologists for years were able to excavate and put their finds in boxes in a garage, Cassman says, and, while that is no longer allowed, basic courses on how to take care of collections are still missing. She recently co-authored a book with Odegaard and Joseph Powell, Human Remains: Guide for Museums and Academic Institutions.

She also is addressing the subject at UD with her “Anthropological Collections Care” course, where students will label and number Rosenberg’s casts. They will send the labels and identifying images to Ethiopia and will design a storage system with the labels indicating placement of the pieces for both the casts and for Lucy. Cassman says this class is the first of its kind at the University. Students also will get firsthand experience with archaeological artifacts on a study abroad program she is directing in Chile next Winter Session.

Cassman says she sees a change in the conservator’s role in museums and other institutions. “Instead of saying ‘no’ all the time, being the police and preventing people from accessing artifacts, I think the role of conservation has changed to aiding safe access,” she says.

“In the case of the Kennewick Man, it meant preventing damage during analysis. I think that’s a change. We’re not there to be a roadblock; we are there to facilitate safe study and preservation.”

by Julia Parmley, AS ’07