Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, Archaeological museum at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States.
The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology is an archaeological museum on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, with a collection drawn from ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures. The museum is housed in a historic building listed on the National Register of Historic Places, connected to a newer wing that expanded its gallery space.
Newberry Hall was built in 1888 by the architectural firm Spier and Rohns and served a different purpose on campus before the university repurposed it for the museum in 1928. Decades later, in 2009, a new wing was added to give the growing collection more room.
The museum focuses strongly on Karanis, an ancient town in the Egyptian Fayum region, and shows the everyday objects its inhabitants left behind. Walking through the galleries, visitors can see tools, textiles, and household items that give a very direct sense of daily life in Roman Egypt.
The museum is open on both weekdays and weekends, though hours vary by day, so it is worth checking before your visit. The building is fully accessible, and its location on the central University of Michigan campus makes it easy to reach on foot from downtown Ann Arbor.
Beyond the displayed objects, the museum holds a large archive of field notes, photographs, and documents from excavations carried out over more than a century at sites across Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, and Libya. These records show not just what archaeologists found, but how they worked and thought at the time.
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