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.
Buddhist Statues, Inside and Out
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 […]
Juvenile Osteology Workshop: Analysis of the Individuals from Patakfalva
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 […]
Art or Ethnography?
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 […]
Puabi’s Ever-Evolving Diadems
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 […]
Illustrating History: An Interview with John Pearson
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 […]