Project Directors
Megan Kassabaum
Meg is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and Weingarten Associate Curator for North America at the Penn Museum. She is an anthropological archaeologist with research interests in public and museum archaeology, archaeology of Philadelphia, pre-contact Native American archaeology of the Eastern United States, monument construction and communal ritual, foodways, and ceramic technology. She is committed to making the archaeology of these topics more accessible to the public.
Sarah Linn
Sarah is the Associate Director of the Academic Engagement Department at the Penn Museum with a background in Mediterranean archaeology. Her work centers on supporting student research in the Museum and making archaeological and anthropological research accessible to the public through engaging interpretive programs and exhibitions, such as Invisible Beauty: The Art of Archaeological Science and The Stories We Wear.
Douglas Smit
Doug is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 2017–2022, he was a Senior Fellow in Anthropology at UPenn. His research focuses on the archaeology of the recent past, how communities develop and interact with larger forces like capitalism, colonialism, and globalization.
Project Staff
Michaela Paulson (Project Conservator)
Michaela is a Project Conservator for the Penn Museum, working on the Ancient Egypt and Nubia Gallery renovation. She is an objects conservator with a focus on the care of archaeological and Indigenous cultural heritage materials and has worked as a site conservator in Italy as part of her conservation MA degree from the UCLA/Getty Program. Michaela has a deep commitment to fully collaborative conservation practices that take preservation beyond materiality and consultation with stakeholders towards a more human-centered approach.
Students
Moriah McKenna
Moriah is a geoarchaeologist and PhD student in Penn Anthropology. Her main research explores how humans and natural processes have worked hand-in-hand over thousands of years to create landscapes that can still be seen today. Moriah is interested in the ways that people make meaning in the places that are important to them, and she is excited to collaborate with community partners through her work with Heritage West.
Arielle Hardy
Arielle is a doctoral candidate in Penn’s Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Graduate Group. She is an art historian and archaeologist, and worked at several art museums and galleries on the West Coast before continuing her graduate work in Philadelphia. As such, she is passionate about facilitating connections with the past through access to objects.
Autumn Melby
Autumn began her Ph.D. in the Department of Anthropology at Penn after completing her B.S. in Anthropology with a concentration in Archaeology and Public History from Appalachian State University in 2018. She is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Autumn's research explores the everyday lives of rural communities in moments of societal crisis or large-scale change. Her work is grounded in the desire to make archaeology accessible and engaging to underprivileged rural communities.
Chelsea Cohen
Chelsea began her Ph.D. in the Department of Anthropology at Penn after completing her BA in Anthropology at DePaul University and her MS in Maritime Archaeology and Conservation from Texas A&M University. As a historical archaeologist focusing on both land and sea, her research looks at the relationships between wooden shipbuilding, forest management, and labor groups in Chesapeake port cities. She also works with plant remains to help explore the lifeways of enslaved individuals in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Public anthropology has been a cornerstone of her education and practice since her first field school as part of a community archaeology project.
Robert Bryant
Born and raised in South Georgia and an alum of Georgia State University where he found a new passion in Archaeology through a B.A. and M.A. in the Anthropology department, Robert is actively working toward finishing his dissertation at in Anthropology Penn. Robert's work focuses on digital methodology, civic engagement, and how gamification can be applied to archaeological fieldwork and data to foster community archaeology. He works primarily on the Naxchivan Archaeological Project and the Bat Archaeological UNESCO Project in Oman.
Chris Lamack
Chris LaMack is a graduate student at Penn interested in local industry and producers during the 19th and early 20th century Industrial Revolutions. In addition to his participation in Heritage West, he is also involved with the Community-Oriented Digital Archaeology (CODA) project, which supports stakeholder-led efforts to document and preserve historic Black burial spaces in southeastern Pennsylvania by connecting them to equipment and archaeologists trained in digital and remote sensing techniques, such as database-building and ground-penetrating radar survey.
Qi Liu
Qi is a Penn undergraduate student from Beijing, China. Majoring in art history and anthropology with a concentration in archaeology, she is interested in recovering the stories of people behind the objects—something that bridges her experience in curation, exhibits, research, and archaeological excavations. Having excavated with the Heritage West team in Fall 2023, she worked as the project's 2024 summer intern.
Faruq Adger
Faruq is a Philadelphia native who grew up in Germantown. He is an undergraduate studying Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology with a minor in Africana Studies at Penn. His goal is to apply his skills to inclusiveness within our society by disrupting embedded values of racism, sexism, homophobia, and colonization as a Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. He began working with Heritage West through the Penn Museum Summer Internship program, conducting research and helping prepare the website text.
Specialists
Katherine Moore
Kate is a zooarchaeologist in CAAM at the Penn Museum who studies animal bones from archaeological sites to find out about ancient food and environments. Her main of area of research is sites in South America that are more than 7,000 years old, but she is also interested in how Philadelphians find and prepare food. In addition to helping Heritage West researchers learn about the meat and shellfish eaten in West Philadelphia, she has studied animal bone collections from the Woodlands along the Schuylkill, a residential street in Center City, a village tavern in Marcus Hook, and a farmstead in the New Jersey Pinelands.
Chad Hill
Chad is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an archaeologist with expertise in remote sensing and spatial analysis and primarily specializes in the later prehistory of the Near East. Chad has helped with mapping and remote sensing as part of excavation planning for Heritage West, including the original Ground Penetrating Radar study of the CEC site that is featured on our blog.
Marie-Claude Boileau
Marie-Claude is the Director of CAAM. Central to her research is the reconstruction of ceramic technological traditions and their development over time and across space. She uses a scientific methodology to trace the potter’s choice and action at every step of the production sequence. She is involved in field and lab-based research projects from the Northern Levant, the East Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, and Philadelphia. She has overseen student research on the bricks recovered from the CEC site.
Jason Herrmann
Jason is the Kowalski Family Teaching Specialist for Digital Archaeology in the Penn Museum’s Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Material (CAAM) and a landscape archaeologist who specializes in the use of remote sensing and spatial analysis. Jason maintains research projects in southwest Asia and the Mediterranean, as well as a community archaeology project in eastern Pennsylvania. As the director of CAAM’s digital laboratory, Jason helps to advise, train, and mentor Heritage West team members as they use digital documentation, analysis, and visualization methods.
Community Advisory Board
Gerald (Sid) Bolling
Marty Ferris
Darnell Holmes
Denise Jackson
Jantra Morris
Walter Palmer
Lydia Parke
Theresa Shockley
Latiaynna Tabb
Erik Weaver
James Wright