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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.


Teens and Trips: Cultural Heritage Education at Gordion, Turkey

By: Naomi Miller

By Janelle Sadarananda, with Naomi F. Miller and Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann This post is part of a series reporting on the Gordion Cultural Heritage Education Project, conceptualized and led by Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann, Deputy Director of the Gordion Project. Halil Demirdelen, Deputy Director of the Ankara museum, provided invaluable educational support. Naomi F. Miller, consulting scholar at the […]

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Teens and Trowels, Cultural Heritage Education at Gordion, Turkey

By: Naomi Miller

By Naomi F. Miller, Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann, and Janelle Sadarananda This post is part of a series reporting on the Gordion Cultural Heritage Education Project, conceptualized and led by Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann, Assistant Director of the Gordion Project. Halil Demirdelen, Deputy Director of the Ankara museum, provided invaluable educational support. Naomi F. Miller, consulting scholar at the Penn […]

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Soft Vegetative Roof Capping at Gordion: A Tutorial Video UPDATE

By: Naomi Miller

July 30, 2015 This is one in a series of posts about the Gordion ecopark:  Although I am primarily an archaeobotanist, I maintain several gardens at the Penn Museum’s excavation project at Gordion, Turkey. The biggest one is in the large area of the Citadel mound that was excavated down to the 800 BC Early […]

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Getting Ready at Pojoaque Pueblo

By: Lucy Fowler Williams

Paths of Beauty: Isabel Gonzales and Shawn Tafoya opens at Pojoaque Pueblo’s Poeh Cultural Center and Museum (in New Mexico) on August 20, just a month away! I am grateful and excited to be curating this exhibition about two of my favorite people, both dedicated teachers and specialists in Pueblo embroidery and pottery. We spent […]

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Soft Vegetative Roof Capping at Gordion: A Tutorial Video

By: Naomi Miller

Archaeobotanists usually deal with dead plants, but as I was finishing my research on the ancient plant remains at Gordion, an ongoing project of the Penn Museum, I became involved in a bigger project: preserving regional biodiversity, the historical landscape, and the archaeological site itself through the management of the native vegetation. The approach sees […]

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Notes from Afghanistan, Day Four: Equal Education for Boys and Girls

By: Brian Rose

Thursday’s events fell into three groups. In the morning we attended the opening of a girls’ school in Ghazni that had been funded by the U.S. Embassy and implemented by the Ghazni Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in conjunction with the Ghazi Department of Women’s Affairs. There were opening speeches by the governor along with an […]

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Notes from Afghanistan, Day Two: A Tour of Ghazni

By: Brian Rose

Early this morning we boarded a military helicopter and flew to Ghazni, nearly 150 km to the southwest of Kabul. The flight took us over the Hindu Kush mountains, which had been crossed by Alexander over 2,300 years ago. We’re staying just outside of Ghazni at a PRC (Provincial Reconstruction Center), which contains a mix […]

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Notes from Afghanistan, Day One

By: Brian Rose

C. Brian Rose, former President of the Archaeological Institute of America, shares his observations about Afghanistan during his current trip: As many of you will remember, two years ago I had the good fortune of visiting Iraq at the invitation of the US Embassy in Baghdad, and I described my impressions of the country, and […]

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