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.
By: Anne Tiballi and Aria Spalding
Archaeobotany is a subfield of archaeology that seeks to better understand human-plant interactions throughout history by studying ancient plant remains. Studying Paleolithic archaeobotanical remains (the Paleolithic spanning 2.5 million years ago to 10,000 years ago) can reveal a wealth of information about human behavior and ancient environments. We can learn about ancient human plant-foraging and […]
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By: Anne Tiballi and Maria Murad
Florence Shotridge (1882-1917), or Kaatxwaaxsnéi, was a Tlingit woman from Haines, Alaska, near the Chilkoot River. She, along with her husband, Louis Shotridge, worked for the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania collecting Tlingit objects and conducting ethnographic research on their own culture. Her husband, Louis Shotridge, is a well-known Tlingit ethnographer and collector, but much […]
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By: Anne Tiballi and Miranda Souza
Rats are not something that many people want to talk about. Who wants to talk about rodents that scurry around and hide stolen things within walls and floorboards? While rats may not be top of mind for most people, they are often at work in many buildings such as museums and old houses, and are […]
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By: Anne Tiballi
Aylar Abdolahzadeh is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology. She is one of several Museum Assistants selected for the 2020-2021 academic year. The Museum Assistantship Program offers paid opportunities for University of Pennsylvania graduate students to work on unique projects within the Penn Museum. The program pairs Museum projects in need of research assistance with skilled […]
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By: Anne Tiballi and Kacie Alaga
Over the course of the past year I had the opportunity to work on a Museum Assistantship project with Dr. Jason Herrmann titled Digging Digital Data: Revisiting the Penn Museum Expedition to Sybaris. In the early 1960s the Penn Museum partnered with the Lerici Foundation of Milan to conduct a series of geophysical surveys in […]
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By: Anne Tiballi and Alex Chen
Hello from China! My name is Alex and I’ve just completed my first year in the cultural anthropology PhD program. I am conducting fieldwork in southeast China currently, where I am working with a social enterprise that conducts social impact trip for Chinese high school students hoping to attend college in the US or UK. […]
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By: Anne Tiballi and Jordan Rogers
Cosa has been featured a half-dozen times in the Summer Fieldwork blogs over the past few years. Penn has sent a sizeable contingent of archaeologists, historians, and philologists to the site to participate in the excavation of the bath complex at the Mid-Republican colonial site in Central Italy. The mere existence of the Bath Complex […]
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By: Anne Tiballi and Samantha Seyler
As a second year PhD student in Anthropology about to enter my third and final year of coursework, I was nervous as I planned my summer. I had spent the last year researching the history of the region surrounding the town of Comas on the eastern slopes of the central Peruvian Andes. And I had […]
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By: Anne Tiballi and Robert Vigar
As a graduate student, my research focus has been on the interaction between local communities and cultural heritage in Upper Egypt. One of the things I am keen to understand is the unauthorized exploitation of archaeological sites, what we often hear referred to as looting. What are the socio-economic, cultural, and historical factors that stimulate […]
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By: Anne Tiballi and Justin Reamer
This summer, with funding from the Penn Museum, I served as a field supervisor and teaching assistant at the Smith Creek Archaeological Project (SCAP) run by Dr. Megan Kassabaum (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Weingarten Assistant Curator for North America) in Wilkinson County, Mississippi. As a field supervisor, my daily duties consisted of supervising students digging […]
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