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 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 […]
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 […]
a BTS of BTS (Behind the Scenes of Beneath the Surface)
By: Lee Roueche
The Digital Media Center recently paired up with the Preparation Department to film a series of short five-question interviews that will be used in the upcoming exhibition Beneath the Surface. Over the last three weeks, we interviewed five experts on topics ranging from the history of the Coclé people of Sitio Conte and the excavation […]
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 […]
Angora Goats in Yassıhöyük, Turkey, Near Gordion
By: Naomi Miller
Ayşe knows everyone in the Yassıhöyük, and one of her friends is Metin the shepherd. Last year, he sold all his sheep and replaced them with a herd of (mostly) angora goats—the kind of goat that produces mohair—which I guess makes him a goat herder. We went out to the corral to watch him prepare […]
Penn Museum Video on WHYY
By: Amy Ellsworth
WHYY has a great video about the Penn Museum on their Friday Arts page today. The video features Dr. Richard Hodges, the Museum’s Williams Director, Dr. Richard Zettler, co-curator of Iraq’s Ancient Past, Dr. David Silverman, co-curator of Amarna: Ancient Egypt’s Place in the Sun, and Alex Pezzatti, Penn Museum Archivist. At minute 22:35 you […]