On Friday, October 16, HRAF will host an event in celebration of International Archaeology Day. Each October, the Archaeological Institute of America and organizations around the world present archaeological programs and activities. This will be HRAF’s fifth annual Archaeology Day event co-sponsored by the UConn Stamford Anthropology Society. HRAF’s Director of Membership and Outreach Matthew Longcore, Ph.D. teaches Anthropology at UConn and is the faculty advisor for the student club.
Click here to RSVP for the Archaeology Day 2026 celebration
UConn students have been invited to New Haven for a day exploring anthropology and cross-cultural research. We will begin our day with a visit to the HRAF offices at 755 Prospect Street. There will be a presentation on cross-cultural research from HRAF’s President Carol Ember, Ph.D., followed by a discussion about the Melvin Ember Internship with current interns Victor de Munck and Alex Knickrehm. Prior to joining HRAF, much of Alex’s work has been in archaeology. He underwent archaeological field training at some of the earliest settlements in South Carolina, and later found a lasting passion in zooarchaeology in his final year as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Following the visit to HRAF, the group will take a tour of the historic Yale University campus. Afterwards the group will have lunch at Yorkside Pizza. New Haven is well-known for its legendary pizza restaurants. Yorkside Pizza, a family operation since 1969, has served generations of Yale students. The day will conclude with a visit to the Yale Peabody Museum followed by coffee at McNay Café on Whitney Avenue, across from the museum.
The Yale Peabody Museum has a new exhibition titled Unfolding History: Writing in Ancient Egypt. The exhibition features never before displayed papyri from Elephantine, Egypt. The exhibition is curated by Victoria Almansa-Villatoro, an Assistant Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Yale University. As a first year Ph.D. student at Brown University studying ancient Egyptian language, Professor Almansa-Villatoro toured the Brooklyn Museum and encountered the oldest set of papyri housed in North America. At that time the collection, donated in 1916 by journalist Charles Edwin Wilbur, was in storage and largely forgotten. The papyri had never been on display or written about. Today, Professor Almansa-Villatoro is studying the set of 4,300-year-old documents written on papyrus to learn more about the history of writing in ancient Egypt.
Professor Almansa-Villatoro has also included objects in the exhibition at the Yale Peabody Museum that describe the life of a scribe in ancient Egypt. Their work ranged from writing about household provisions to composing royal documents. Since less than one percent of the population was able to read and write, scribes held a lauded place in Egyptian society. Scribes were depicted in statues with the tools of their trade and had patron gods.
“It was not an office, but a kind of qualification. When someone in ancient Egypt wrote ‘scribe’ next to their name, it was as if someone today wrote ‘Ph.D.’,” Almansa-Villatoro said.
A hieroglyphic inscription on the frieze of the Sterling Memorial Library from an ancient Egyptian text known as the Satire of the Trades shows how the scribes themselves regarded their work as the highest of all skills. “I will cause you to love the writings more than your mother. I will cause their perfection to be introduced in your sight. It is, indeed, the greatest of all offices,” according to the text.
Many thanks to UConn students for joining us in celebration of Archaeology Day 2026. We will post a reflection with photos after the event.
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