Welcome to the Penn Museum blog. First launched in January 2009, the Museum blog now has over 800 posts covering a range of topics in the categories of Museum, Collection, Exhibitions, Research, and By Location. Here you’ll hear directly from our staff and Penn students about their work, research, experiences, and discoveries. To explore the Museum's other digital content, visit The Digital Penn Museum.
Gods of Rock
By: Tom Stanley
Forget about Freddy Mercury. Forget about Chuck Berry. In the good old days, long before the days of the idol on the stage, humanity looked to the natural world for help in satisfying their cravings for idolatry. Thousands of years ago, the people of ancient Egypt—who lived in one of the world’s most advanced early […]
We Dig Love: The Daily Dig, Valentine’s Edition
By: Tom Stanley
Is there any experience more powerful than falling in love? Most people would be hard-pressed to name an example. Love binds us together—it brings us joy and comfort, and sometimes sadness; it can also drive us to do extraordinary things, occasionally beyond the limits of common sense. And it’s been the driving force behind some […]
Training Day: Evacuating a Simulated Gallery in an Emergency Drill
By: Tom Stanley
In addition to being a staff member at the Museum, I’m also enrolled as a student at Penn, in the Master of Liberal Arts program. It’s a very flexible program in terms of its schedule, which is great for people like me who work full-time jobs; it also offers considerable flexibility in terms of its content […]
Discovery in Action: A Penn Student’s Experience
By: Tom Stanley
Discovery is a recurring theme here at the Penn Museum. From scholarly researchers to casual visitors, few who come through our doors are able to escape without discovering something about the vast history of humanity. And every now and then, the Museum even serves as a vehicle for personal discovery—for finding out something about one’s own […]
A Special Performance (and Special Guest) for the Penn Museum Summer Campers
By: Tom Stanley
Being a camper in the Museum’s “Anthropologists in the Making” Summer Camp comes with plenty of perks. Campers go for informative gallery tours with their counselors; they make spectacular arts & craft projects based on ancient cultures of the world; sometimes, they even get to dig for artifacts in our inner gardens (in sandboxes, that […]
Fishing for Clues on the Smith Creek Archaeological Project
By: Tom Stanley
In addition to this Sunday, June 18 being Father’s Day, it’s also something called “Go Fishing Day”—at least, according to the Internet, it is. To me, it’s a leisure activity; to others throughout the history of the Americas, it’s been a necessity for subsistence. For those of us who don’t have time to drive out […]
Happy 147th Birthday, Alexander Stirling Calder
By: Tom Stanley
January 11 marks the birthday of Alexander Stirling Calder, a man who left his indelible mark on the city of Philadelphia—and here at the Penn Museum, as well. To mark the occasion, Erin Gregory, a graduate student at the University of the Arts who interned in the Museum’s Marketing & Communications office last semester, wrote […]
The “Idea Lounge”
By: Tom Stanley
The third floor of the Penn Museum is home to our smallest gallery, which we refer to simply as our Special Exhibitions Gallery. Despite its limited size (approx. 300 square feet), this gallery has hosted some fascinating exhibitions in recent years—most recently, a cross-cultural survey titled Sex: A History in 30 Objects. A new installation […]
Digging Deeper at Gordion
By: Tom Stanley
When it comes to the Citadel Mound at Gordion—the primary focus of the Gordion Archaeological Project’s work this year—one thing is quite clear, even to a newcomer such as myself: this is a very large site. As I mentioned before, it measures 450 x 300 meters, which equals roughly the size of 19 American football […]
Ankara and Gordion: First Days on the Ground
By: Tom Stanley
I boarded a plane at the Philadelphia International Airport last Tuesday at around 10:30 am. Two layovers and 20 sleepless hours later, I landed at Esenboga Airport in Ankara, Turkey, at roughly 1:30 pm local time. I found my checked bag, exchanged some US currency for Turkish Lira, and got myself a yellow cab at […]