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.
The Ainu People and an Early Anthropological Friendship Across an Ocean
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.
Ellen Kohler at Gordion
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 […]
What in the World?
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 […]
Copyright for dummies (like me)
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 […]
The Booger Dance.
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.