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.
Lantern Slide Salon: The Adventures of Furness, Harrison, and Hiller in Color
By: Alessandro Pezzati
In its 125-year history, the Penn Museum has sent out anthropological and archaeological expeditions throughout the world. Between 1895 and 1903, three young men affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania undertook several expeditions to the Far East. Their principal destination was the island of Borneo, to traverse the interior of the island and collect ethnological […]
Archives Photo of the Week: Bhutia Girl
By: Eric Schnittke
This week’s photo features an image collected by William Furness, III., Alfred C. Harrison, Jr., and Hiram M. Hiller. Between 1895 and 1901, the three men traveled across Oceania and Asia, collecting substantial amounts of ethnological, archaeological, and skeletal materials. Included in their collecting were many photographic materials, including this week’s photo of the week. This […]
Ur Digitization Project: September 2013
By: Brad Hafford
Excavation of the ancient city, 1930-31 Season Spotlight on Domestic Area AH Reconstructing original house numbers and the process of their excavation One of the great accomplishments of the Ur excavation was the large extent of domestic architecture it revealed. Many early archaeological efforts focused almost exclusively on monumental structures and grandiose tombs. Woolley certainly […]
“Arms Raised in a V”
By: Michael Condiff
I’ve been a fan of TED Talks for a while and somewhat recently I watched Amy Cuddy: Your body language shapes who you are. One of the things that struck me in the talk was the expression of power she refers to as “Pride”. The pride expression as Amy Cuddy describes it is “arms up […]
Animal Imagery from Kourion Cyprus
By: Tessa de Alarcon
I finished up my part in the Digital Kourion project over the summer and to end it I wanted to highlight some of my favorite objects that I photographed from this unique collection. These photos are now online as part of the Penn Museum’s Online Collection Database (Kourion). One of the things I found particularly […]
Archives Photo of the Week
By: Eric Schnittke
This week’s photo features an image from the Penn Museum’s excavations at Tikal in Guatemala. William Coe, former curator of the American Section at the museum, captured the excavation of an upside-down face sculpture in Structure 34 of the North Acropolis at Tikal. This image is featured in Archivist Alessandro Pezzati’s book Adventures in Photography: Expeditions of the […]
Wake Me Up When The Summer Ends
By: Eric Schnittke
With summer starting to fade to fall, the Penn Museum gladly says goodbye to the heat and discomfort of this past summer. The Archives would like to send off the season in the right way, with a look back at how the museum used to deal with its visitors during the heat (operative words: used […]
Treating Archival Treasures
By: Heather Brown
If you’re reading this blog, you probably know that the Penn Museum’s collection holds nearly one million archaeological and anthropological objects. What some may not know is that the Museum also houses an archive that holds 2,500 linear feet of records—documents, films, and images—about the collection, the history of archaeology and anthropology, the museum’s expeditions, […]
Ur Digitization Project: August 2013
By: Brad Hafford
Reconstructing Excavation Processes Spotlight on Division of Finds: Penn’s acquisition of its Ur material Tens of thousands of artifacts were uncovered in the twelve years of excavation at the ancient city of Ur, from 1922-1934. The Ur of the Chaldees project, with lead funding from the Leon Levy Foundation, is still uncovering exactly where each […]