University of Pennsylvania Finding Aids

Walter A. Fairservis, anthropologist, curator, author, actor, director, and playwright served as Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Vassar College and surveyed and excavated in sites in Egypt, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. He published books on the roots of the Harappan civilization as well as the seals and signs of the Indus written language among other topics. Fairservis was also known as a curator, having planned the "Hall of Asian Peoples" at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The Walter A. Fairservis papers consist of eight folders of his records and thirteen folders of photographs of the Rabari people of Gujarat, India taken by Vivian and Irene Bose. There are folders of correspondence, proposals, research in Harappan script and the Na'rmr Palette, some slides and plates for a contribution to a book by Robert W. Ehrich among the Fairservis materials.