Preserving Buddhist Murals

Apr. 30, 2024

By Sarah Lavin

It’s been nearly a decade since visitors could see the Penn Museum’s Buddhist Murals. Conservators are working to bring them back into view.

Read More

Mar. 20, 2023

By Sean Billups

Ancient Glow-in-the-Dark Artifacts

“Technical analysis” is a term frequently used in the conservation field to describe the use of specialized techniques to examine objects. Those techniques can include using scientific instruments, special cameras, and lots of other equipment. Maybe that term sounds boring, but in addition to telling you a lot about an object, you can also sometimes find fun surprises. 

Collections

Jan. 08, 2023

By Chris LaMack

Archaeology Behind the Scenes

This past summer, our team from the Paleoecology Lab and the South Asia Center at Penn spent three weeks conducting preliminary work on our new South Asian Landscape Trajectories (SILT) project – and none of it involved excavation. A lot of it however, involved tea.

Fieldwork

Dec. 12, 2022

By Cameron Findlay

The Process of Processing

Step 1: Acquiring the Objects Step 2: Bagging, Tagging, Measuring Step 3: Hand-Numbering Step 4: Creating Digital Records Step 5: Photography Written by Cameron Findlay, Penn Museum Intern (Summer 2022) Cameron Findlay is a senior at Smith College majoring in Anthropology and minoring in Art History, with a concentration in Museum Studies. She was one […]

Collections | Students

Overhead view of discussion.

Dec. 12, 2022

By Lynn Meskell

UNESCO World Heritage at 50

PIK Professor Dr. Lynn Meskell, who among her appointments holds the position of Curator in the Asian and Near East Sections of the Penn Museum, recently organized a workshop on global cultural heritage at Perry World House. In the following, Meskell sets out the conference and its contribution.

Research

May. 15, 2022

By Sarah LaPorte

Cold War Archaeology

A large-scale archival “deep-dive” that considers multiple angles for how the US government, private industries, and academia came together in Froelich Rainey’s long career.

Students

Jul. 22, 2021

By Christy Ching

Special Photography for Larger Objects

Photogrammetry is a technology that gathers spatial and color information of an object from multiple photographs to form a geometrically corrected, highly detailed, stitched image called an orthomosaic. Essentially, photogrammetry creates a distortion-free, three-dimensional model of an object based on two-dimensional photos of every surface photographed in sections. 

Collections