The month of April is a month full of dedications – everything from Fools (April 1) to Administrative Professionals (April 24) and even the whole Earth itself (April 22) receive a special day. My personal favorite celebration for April is National Poetry Month. Back in February, second graders from Abington School District visited the Penn [...]
That’s how they say “A big success” in Honduras. I learned that last week in Copan, the site where Penn Museum has been involved for over 25 years. I went to Honduras in mid February with other Museum staff members (Dr. Loa Traxler, Bob Thurlow, and Tessa de Alarcon) for two purposes: to see the [...]
I am in Copan Ruinas, Honduras along with Lynn Grant and Loa Traxler working on the final touches for a workshop on field conservation. This is my first time in Honduras and therefore in Copan. The site is certainly a marvel, but I expected it to be. The real surprise has been the CRIA (Centro [...]
Sometime in 2009, before I came to the museum, there was a major migration in both server, platform and URL of the Museums’ website. These were necessary and progressive moves in the ever changing technological landscape, however, it was not without cost. In the same way time and earth might cover over the traces of [...]
This past Saturday, January 26th, the centerpiece of our new exhibit, Unearthing a Masterpiece: A Roman Mosaic from Lod, Israel arrived and work began to set the pieces into place. The mosaic is so big, that it is shipped in 7 crates. The crates themselves are so large, that they could not be brought in [...]
If you have been to our Museum, odds are you’ve seen people carting around objects or rolling large crates through galleries and mysteriously disappearing behind locked doors. Most likely, those people were Registrars. When I’m asked what Museum Registrars do, I usually say we deal with record keeping and moving objects in, out, and around [...]
In the Artifact Lab: Conserving Egyptian Mummies opened on September 30 and we have since been very busy-not only working on examining and treating objects from our Egyptian collection, but also speaking with the public on a daily basis. We had a big crowd for the 125th Anniversary open house, and some of our busiest [...]
One of the first projects I remember working on at the museum was briefly helping with was “Iyare!” – a fascinating exhibit of African material from Benin – and one of the most-eye catching pieces in the exhibit was this intricate plaque. The bronze plaques from the 16th Century Nigerian kingdom have long amazed people [...]
Corn is an important part of Maya culture. In the Popol Vuh, Maya cosmology holds that the Gods created the first humans from an ear of corn. Another sign of the importance of corn is the multiple names it has in Mayan language. The tortilla, a dietary staple, also has several names that change depending [...]
The Maya are well known for their achievements in counting and documenting time, but do they deserve a reputation for human sacrifice? For ancient Americans this was a ritualized practice that was considered a payment to the Gods for the gift of life. The Aztec are believed to have conducted mass human sacrifice, but the evidence we have for the [...]
