By: Samantha Thompson

To the untrained eye, the Sakyamuni Buddha in the China Gallery appears visually similar to other nearby Buddha sculptures. While it borrows from traditional Buddhist iconography found during the Yuan Dynasty, certain aspects of the sculpture are unique to this Sakyamuni Buddha. The sculpture was made with dry-lacquer, a rare and laborious technique, and strikes […]

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By: Anne Tiballi and Julia Simons

This summer, I attended a workshop on Juvenile Osteology in Odorheiu Secuiesc, Romania. The students in the field school (“fieldies”) work at the excavation site, excavating, mapping, and pulling the skeletons buried at the church at Patakfalva, while the students in the lab (“labbies”) analyze the individuals excavated in previous field sessions. The individuals from […]

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By: Anne Tiballi and Christopher Green

Museums in the US, England, France, and throughout the world are full of objects collected during their respective colonial periods. Museums have been grappling with the colonial legacies embodied in their collections and how to represent them, and no singular answer has emerged. However, at the end of the 20th century, a movement pioneered by […]

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By: Idil Demirdag

All the objects in the Penn Museum have incredible histories. Few of them have a journey as enigmatic and evolving as Queen Puabi’s diadems. In fact, the three individual pieces of diadems seen in the Middle East Galleries right now were once displayed as a six-piece set, and prior to that were all part of […]

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By: Julianna Whalen

As I walk down the street, I pass donkeys carrying food in saddlebags and children making their way home. They weave through tight streets and around dogs laying in the middle of the path. Birds flit through the sky. As I make my way toward the ziggurat, a crescent moon begins to rise over the […]

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