I recently embarked on a research trip that revealed new insights into the cultural contexts of some of the Met's most beloved objects made of gold, silver, and copper from Central and South America. The ancient artists that lived in present-day Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru produced incredible metal masterpieces now found in national, public, and private collections around the world. Though the specific focus of my trip was to study metallurgical traditions, visits to archaeological sites and new museums held many surprises pertaining to the arts of architecture, textiles, pottery, and even woodworking. Throughout the trip, I documented our team's visits to each place on Twitter. Here is a summary of the three-week journey from Panama to Peru, illustrated with a selection of the photos I tweeted.

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The Museum offers hundreds of events and programs each month—including lectures, performances, tours, family activities, and more. The following listings are just a sample of our upcoming programs.

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On Monday, February 2, I was thrilled to be a part of a Bloomberg Philanthropies–hosted "Instameet," an event bringing together people who use Instagram for a whirlwind session of picture-taking. I found myself among some wonderful Museum colleagues, staff from Bloomberg Philanthropies, and some of the most influential Instagramers in New York City.

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Speaking with great sadness on behalf of the Metropolitan, a museum whose collection proudly protects and displays the arts of ancient and Islamic Mesopotamia, we strongly condemn this act of catastrophic destruction to one of the most important museums in the Middle East. The Mosul Museum's collection covers the entire range of civilization in the region, with outstanding sculptures from royal cities such as Nimrud, Nineveh, and Hatra in northern Iraq. This mindless attack on great art, on history, and on human understanding constitutes a tragic assault not only on the Mosul Museum, but on our universal commitment to use art to unite people and promote human understanding. Such wanton brutality must stop, before all vestiges of the ancient world are obliterated.

In preparing a history of the Museum's Department of Asian Art, which this year celebrates its centennial by showcasing its unparalleled collection through a range of exhibitions, gallery talks, and other offerings, I have uncovered a number of little-known facts and many "secrets" that are not widely known to the public. Here are nine of the most fascinating.

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The remains of the festival city of Malqata are located on the west bank of the Nile, about 430 miles south of Cairo, opposite the modern city of Luxor (usually referred to by Egyptologists as Thebes). The festival city dates to the time of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, who reigned during the second half of Dynasty 18, during Egypt's New Kingdom. This pharaoh was the father of Akhenaten, and very likely the grandfather of Tutankhamun.

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For several years The Metropolitan Museum of Art has been collaborating with the NYU Langone Medical Center Department of Radiology, using computed tomography (CT) to scan objects in the Museum's collection for research purposes.

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Included in the Arms and Armor: Notable Acquisitions 2003–2014 exhibition, curated by Donald J. La Rocca and currently on display in the galleries of the Department of Arms and Armor though December 6, are several printed designs associated with ornamental firearms. Upon acquisition, two of these prints—the decorative title page from the album Plusieurs Piéces et Ornements Darquebuzerie, acquired in 2011, and a design for the stock of a musket from the Nouveaux Desseins D'Arquebuseries De Lacollombe, acquired in 2013—appeared similarly stained and damaged, but underwent distinctly different conservation campaigns. The two prints, as well as all of the other works on paper currently on display, will be on view through March 2015, due to their preservation needs.

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The Department of Islamic Art has over three thousand ceramic objects in its collection, with perhaps the largest corpus of the collection acquired from the Museum's excavations in Nishapur, Iran, during the mid-twentieth century. While the department maintains a fine collection of Safavid and Ottoman ceramics, ceramic work from south Asia is not as well represented. Among these examples of south Asian ceramics, my favorite is an eighteenth-century tile from Multan, in present-day Pakistan (pictured above). In terms of both material and technique, the tile is typical of ceramics from this part of south Asia, as are three similar objects in the collection—an eighteenth-century dish and two late fifteenth-century tiles (2008.461 and 2008.462).

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