By: Alison Miner

Given this rhetoric, and the colonial relationship between the Japanese government and the Ainu peoples, it is not surprising that their culture was not well studied for many years. In 1900, however, a traveler from Philadelphia, Hiram Hiller, took a detour from his pan-Asian journeys to visit Hokkaido. He met Jenichiro Oyabe, a Japanese man who was educated as a missionary, but who became a self-trained ethnographer of the Ainu people.

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By: Maureen Callahan

The woman in this image, Ellen Kohler, was an Anatolian and classical archaeologist based at the Penn Museum for the majority of her career.  In this photo, she is demonstrating the use of a quern stone at the site of Gordion, in central Turkey. Gordion is located fifty miles southwest of Ankara and is one […]

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By: Maureen Callahan

What in the World? was the Penn Museum’s Peabody Award-winning popular weekly half-hour television program which was first seen in 1951 and broadcast for 14 years. By the early 1960s it was one of the oldest programs on television, bringing positive reviews and a steady stream of fanmail to the Museum. On each What in […]

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By: Maureen Callahan

As far as I can tell, many archivists take a cross-your-fingers-and-pray-like-hell approach to copyright. We err on the side of openness, make a lot of reproductions, and generally feel embarrassed that we haven’t slapped *more* images onto the internet (ergo this blog). If there’s ever a struggle between access and copyright concerns, access usually wins […]

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By: Alison Miner

While this appears to be a picture of a visiting muppet, in actuality it is a Cherokee man, wearing a mask for the ceremonial Booger Dance.

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