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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.

Approaching Cultural Heritage through Digital Anthropology at the Penn CHC — By Jacob J. Demree

By: Stephanie Mach

Submitted by: Jacob J. Demree, Summer 2017 Intern This summer, I interned with the Penn Cultural Heritage Center (Penn CHC) and others at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Smithsonian Institution, and other academic organizations, working to compile a comprehensive, qualitative, dataset of cultural repositories around the world. Under a grant […]

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European Archaeology as Anthropology, edited by Pam J. Crabtree and Peter Bogucki

By: Page Selinsky

European Archaeology as Anthropology Essays in Memory of Bernard Wailes An edited book in honor of a living scholar is a common type of publication. There is even a fancy German word for it, a Festschrift. This book is a memorial volume, which also has its own special term, a Gedenkschrift. The chapters in this […]

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Medical Residents Explore Implicit Bias at the Penn Museum

By: Pam Kosty

Fresh Eyes in the Galleries  It was 8:00 am on a Thursday morning in July, early for most Museum staff, but the special visitors from the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania—seven medical residents and a program director—appeared wide awake and ready to engage. The residents had agreed to participate in a pilot program at […]

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Catfish, Waffles, and Coffee: Historic Food in Philadelphia

Catfish Neurocranium

By: Julianna Whalen

In addition to being back-to-school time, August is National Catfish Month. Catfish might not be a part of your daily life, but the fish once played an important role in the lives of Philadelphians. In a way, it’s like cheesesteak is today; when tourists came to Philadelphia in the 19th century, they would ask their […]

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An Ancient Typo

Re-carved Hieroglyphs

By: Julianna Whalen

While it’s easy to be captivated by pyramids and mummies, the depth of ancient Egyptian history can be difficult to process. Dr. Stephen Phillips, Curatorial Research Coordinator in the Penn Museum’s Egyptian Section, stresses this: When you are in Egypt today, something that sinks in very quickly, especially while you are out on the Nile […]

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