Joukowsky's work on exhibit at American Museum of Natural History

by Mary Jo Curtis

Seldom is there a major exhibit of an archaeologist's work in his or her lifetime, but Brown's Professor Martha Sharp Joukowsky is now among the few who have been so honored.

Since 1993, Joukowsky has led a team of Brown archaeologists and students in excavating the Great Temple of Petra, racing against time and the ravages of the desert to uncover the architecture and artifacts of the ancient Jordanian site. Now their work is on display in "Petra: Lost City of Stone," a special traveling exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City through July 6. On March 14 Joukowsky, director of Brown's Center for Old World Archaeology and Art, gave a slide-illustrated lecture on Petra's Great Temple and the exhibit at the New York museum.

Located about 50 miles south of the Dead Sea in Jordan, Petra (from the Greek, meaning "rock") is probably best recognized today as the setting of the final scenes of the movie "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." In the first century B.C., however, it was the principle city of ancient Nabataea, and its position at the crossroads of Middle Eastern trade routes brought the city prominence, as well as success in the spice trade. During the 11 years Joukowsky and her colleagues have spent at the site, they have unearthed more than 10,000 architectural fragments - and more than 325,000 cultural objects, such as pottery, bone, faience earthenware, glass and shell.

The Brown group is one of five archaeological teams working at Petra, including representatives from the American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR) and the Department of Antiquities of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Together they have transported some 40 tons of sculpture and artifacts from Jordan to New York for the exhibition, collectively shining a spotlight on this unique and extraordinary desert city.

"This exhibit marks the first time all of these Nabataean things have been brought together, from Petra as well as other sites," said Joukowsky.

The focus of the Brown team, the Great Temple, is "one of the largest free-standing structures in Petra," according to Joukowsky. The limestone elephants (left) that adorn the columns of the temple are among the most striking items in the exhibit. "There is nothing like them anywhere else in the world," she said.

In addition to sharing the historic finds from Petra with the public through this exhibit, Joukowsky and her Brown colleagues have taken innovative steps to preserve the site, using technology to capture and restore aspects of the Great Temple for future generations. Supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, she has collaborated with a group of scientists and artists to digitally represent and manipulate two- and three-dimensional shapes from data recorded in Petra by laser range scanners and digital and video cameras to create tools for archaeological site analysis.

One dramatic result of that effort was the development of ARCHAVE (ARCHAeology in Virtual Environments), an immersive virtual reality rendering of the Great Temple in Brown's CAVE (Technology Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization). The team is developing a prototype for a desktop version of ARCHAVE that will be less expensive and more readily available to students and researchers. It is also developing technological tools to aid archaeologists in the reconstruction of artifacts from the thousands of shards they have found - a time-consuming and sometimes impossible task - by using various mathematical models and applying shape theories to automatically reassemble 3-D objects from fragments and represent how the original items are likely to have looked, even when only a few pieces are available to analyze.

In July the Petra exhibit will travel to the Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio, and then to an exhibition in Canada.

Go online for more information on BrownÕs project at Petra.

For more information on the exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, visit http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/petra.