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.
Archives Photo of the Week: Halloween
By: Eric Schnittke
Halloween was yesterday and the Penn Museum Archives wanted to leave you with one last treat for the holiday. One of the spookiest images in our collection, this photo is of a cow’s skull mounted on a stick to act as a scarecrow in Damghan, Iran. Damghan is near the site Tepe Hissar, where the […]
Archives Photo of the Week: Baseball
By: Eric Schnittke
With baseball’s World Series starting this week, it’s fitting to pay tribute to the Fall Classic with the Photo of the Week. Featured in this image is a baseball team from an indemnity school, most likely Tsinghua College in Peking, China. Tsinghua College (now Tsinghua University) was created as a preparatory school as part of the Boxer […]
Archives Photo of the Week: Mummy Bundles
By: Eric Schnittke
This week’s photo of the week comes from Pachacamac in Peru. The Penn Museum excavations at Pachacamac were led by Max Uhle, a German philologist and archaeologist who was continuing the work that he had undertaken for the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. Uhle’s explorations of South America lasted from 1895 to 1897. Featured in the image are […]
Remember the Fotomat?
By: Amy Ellsworth
Remember the olden days when you had to wait 3 grueling days to get your precious photos developed? Remember the poor person stuck in that Fotomat booth in the grocery store parking lot? I went to the Archives yesterday for a little light reading from our Historic Structures Report (to confirm whether or not the […]
Meet the Staff
By: Amy Ellsworth
Most museum professionals make a point to scan the industry landscape for daily feeds on what their colleagues and counterparts are up to. We call this “sourcing inspiration” in order to inform our own projects and generate ideas for new directions in actualizing our mission. This action often amounts to plain and simple stealing, thinly […]