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.
New Program for Visitors with Vision Loss
By: Kevin Schott
For over five years, the Penn Museum has been developing and offering programs for visitors who have vision loss. We started out by offering “touch tours” of the Egyptian galleries. Our Conservation Department identified real artifacts on display that our visitors with vision loss could touch with minimal impact to the artifacts. We were all […]
A Super-8 Film from 1974 Finds Its People
By: Kate Pourshariati
Last summer, through a lucky set of connections, including introduction to the Museum’s new South Asia Curator Kathleen (Kathy) Morrison, the Museum was able to reunite the anthropologist Christine Padoch with a single camera roll of super 8 film that she shot in 1974 in Malaysian Borneo. Senior Archivist Alex Pezzati located the film rolls […]
Traces of Culture in Traces of Paint
By: Margaret Bruchac
This object analysis was conducted for the Fall 2017 University of Pennsylvania course “Anthropology of Museums.” Students are examining Native American objects in the American Section of the Penn Museum by combining material analysis (elements, construction, design, condition, etc.) with documentation (texts, photographs, ethnographic data, etc.). Since some objects have minimal provenance data, we seek out similar materials, […]
“Excuse Me Miss, What Newspaper Are You From?” – Leniqueca Welcome
By: Anne Tiballi
“I’m going to finish setting up here. Go ahead! You are free to talk to people and collect the information you need. You are very safe here [he smiled in reassurance]. Just let me know if you need anything, OK?” Anthony probably read my reluctance to leave his side that Saturday afternoon at the launch […]
Walls, Walls Everywhere, and None of Them in a Line – Kurtis Tanaka
By: Anne Tiballi
Returning to a project after a few seasons absence can be at once rewarding and disorienting; rewarding to see the progress and preliminary results made in the meantime, disorienting to pick up where you remember leaving things when last you were there. Certainly this was my experience at the Gordion Project this summer, to which […]