Archival documents of the month Spotlight on Maps of Excavated Domestic Areas EM and AH Published in Antiquaries Journal 1927, 1931, and in Ur Excavations volume 7 My last blog post concerned the questions of the standard house in the period most revealed in Woolley’s excavations. Now I want to cover the larger concept of [...]
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 [...]
Recently the Archives department had a request for footage of Morocco, which turned out to be for a film about current day and historic use of water in Rabat. Once again Watson Kintner’s beautiful Kodachrome footage (1951, etc.) has had another outing in the world, this time returned to Rabat where the filmmaker has presented [...]
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 [...]
One of the most interesting new Museum projects is our current exhibition, In the Artifact Lab: Conserving Egyptian Mummies. It’s unique in a number of ways, but notably for the fact that you can actually talk to the experts as they conduct live conservation work right before your eyes. As a coordinator for our social [...]
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 [...]
Archival document of the month Spotlight on A.S. Whitburn reconstruction drawing of No. 3 Gay Street Early archaeologists often concentrated on temples, palaces and cemeteries, since these were most likely to contain impressive artifacts for museums. Woolley dug his fair share of these areas, but to his great credit, he did not overlook the more [...]
Tam An Mah Cave Buried jar site, Luang Prabang province, Laos “In January 2010, Joyce White, MMAP co-director Bounheuang Bouasisengpaseuth, and other scholars from the United States, Italy, Ireland, Australia, England, Thailand, the Philippines, and Laos conducted a short but intensive excavation at a rock shelter site named Tham An Mah (Horse Saddle Cave). This [...]
The most thrilling aspect of working in the Archives here at the Penn Museum is that during the course of your day you might discover something unexpected. In my two and a half years as a work-study student, I had yet to make a discovery, until about two weeks ago when I came across a [...]
