A Well Traveled Collection Returns

By Steven Scarpa

Archaeologist Sarah Ranlett knows that the average person who sees a Stone Age handaxe thinks it looks like just a rock. So, she tells its story. 

She explains how a prehistoric person shaped the stone by chipping at it strategically, a process called knapping. That person had to think several steps ahead to envision the outcome, an important development in the history of human cognition. The handaxes have been argued to show early elements of artistic expression because of their symmetry. 

When you hold the handaxe – which might have been neither an ax nor used by hand – you feel the scope of human history. The rough tool nestles into your palm. Your fingers easily fit over indentations in the stone. You realize that you are holding hands with another human over hundreds of thousands of years. “Now and then you get this moment of connection,” Ranlett said. “You think, ‘I know what you were doing here.’ It never gets old.” 

That is the power of the Yale University Prehistoric Exhibition to Nubia (YUPEN) collection, of which the handaxe is a small part. In early March, the collection returned to the Yale Peabody Museum after a half-century global odyssey. Ranlett, a postdoctoral associate in anthropology, is reunifying what might be the largest collection of Egyptian paleolithic material in the United States. 

“The fact that this material is now all coming back to Yale is quite amazing,” said John Darnell, professor of Egyptology and Curator in Anthropology at the Peabody. “The collection has gone from something that might have been completely lost to something that’s now really being preserved and will be here at Yale for people around the world to look at and study.” 

“There is a lot of knowledge in this collection waiting to be unlocked,” said Agnete Wisti Lassen, Associate Curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection, and interim lead collection manager of the Anthropology Division at the Peabody. “It’s a real untapped resource.” 

Charles A. Reed, curator of mammals and reptiles at the Peabody, led a series of three field seasons in Nubia from 1962 to 1965, to create a record of the prehistoric remains found along the Nile River. The construction of the Aswan High Dam would flood part of the valley. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) approved the group’s efforts to preserve the region’s cultural heritage before it washed away.  

Hundreds of thousands of objects collected from almost 400 locations were crammed into the team’s houseboat. Reed and his team took an expansive view of prehistory, collecting geologic and natural objects, and cultural artifacts. “For the stone tools, they would have done a typological analysis on the cultural material, looking at the different forms tools take and how they were created,” Ranlett said. 

The collection shows how Stone Age humans moved from North Africa, up the Nile Valley, and north into Europe. The type and location of the stone tools is important for understanding human movement over time. “One of the main questions that archaeology and evolutionary biology are trying to address is the dispersal of our human ancestors since the origin of our species,” Ranlett said. “The Nile Valley may have acted as a kind of refuge where species would go in times of environmental stress throughout archaeological prehistory.” 

Darnell believes the collection will offer insight into “the crucible of pharaonic Egypt.” “These are the places where these different cultures and groups are coming together under the stresses of the changing climate of the time, especially between the sixth and fourth millennium BC, and are forced to accommodate each other. They have to get along. They have to meld into something bigger,” Darnell said. 

The tools themselves offer clues about how they were used by prehistoric people. Some pieces found in the region showed evidence of early farming practices. “The human tool kits around the world are varied and specific to the tasks that you need to do. So, from looking at the tools, you can tell how much a culture is gathering as opposed to hunting,” Darnell said. 

Reed had an ambitious research agenda for the materials. His Spring 1966 essay in the Peabody magazine Discovery crackles with anticipation. “Although several research papers have been published and others are in preparation, the final results of our scientific labors will not emerge for many years, until the last of our collections have been studied, and then this knowledge integrated with the results from other expeditions,” Reed wrote. 

While the collection certainly has tales it can tell about Paleolithic Egypt, it also carries a whiff of intrigue. Its history was marked by an alleged theft, Ranlett said.  

The collection disappeared for several years in the early 1970s. In a well-meaning, but misguided display of initiative, a graduate student took most of it, filling a box truck rather than his Volkswagen minibus. He thought he was acting in a way that would benefit the work. “His supervisor said, ‘What have you done? You weren’t supposed to do this,” Ranlett said. The student refused to return the materials and later stashed them in a storage shed in Washington state. Yale threatened litigation to get the collection back in the hands of researchers. 

For all his hope at the beginning of the project, Reed’s academic hopes would not come to fruition. Ranlett said the collection was not used for any extensive research. Reed entered a period of career transition. As time passed, other researchers became interested in different topics, retired, or died. “You don’t have a lot of consistency across the years. No one is settled,” Ranlett said.  

Well-meaning scholars split the YUPEN collection across Europe and North America. “The collection was split up and moved about in common research practice, with the right intentions: so that the right parts of the collections get to the right scholars with the relevant expertise to get research done. During all that splitting and moving, parts of the collection were, at several times, at real risk of being lost, forgotten, or discarded,” Ranlett said.  

A small part of the collection was catalogued at the Peabody in the 1960s. Another part of the New Haven piece of the collection was missing until the late 1990s when it was found in a downtown storage space. The materials were still in the 55-gallon oil drums they shipped in from Egypt.  

“Those scholars whose research ambitions for the YUPEN collection may never have come to fruition still made every effort to make sure the collection, and its documentation, would survive to one day be studied by future researchers,” Ranlett said.  

Ranlett has begun the process of cataloging the artifacts and archival materials. Her research has found other smaller pieces of the collection at the Field Museum in Chicago. She is now working to bring them home. “It will be nice to get it all back together in one place,” Ranlett said. 

There are publications featuring the collection on the horizon in the coming year, Ranlett said. “It will announce its existence. I think there will be an uptick interest. North Africa is always an exciting place for archaeology, but especially now. There is just a lot that can be done,” Ranlett said.  

Thanks to Ranlett’s work, a researcher will pick up that Stone Age handaxe and have new revelations – decades in the making.