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.
Teens and Tumuli: Cultural Heritage Education at Gordion, Turkey
By: Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann
By Ayșe Gürsan-Salzmann, Naomi F. Miller, and Janelle Sadarananda This post is part of a series reporting on the Gordion Cultural Heritage Education Project, led by Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann, Assistant Director of the Gordion Project. Halil Demirdelen, Deputy Director of the Ankara museum, provided invaluable educational support. Naomi F. Miller, consulting scholar at the Penn Museum, and […]
Yassıhöyük Village: Where and when did the villagers come from?
By: Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann
About 100 years ago the earliest known inhabitants of the Yassıhöyük village arrived there from different regions of Anatolia, and settled near the banks of the Sakarya river that flowed through the ancient settlement of Gordion. The early subsistence base was animal husbandry supplemented by farming cereals with horse and iron-tipped wooden plough, a threshing […]
A Summer Day in the Village of Yassıhöyük
By: Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann
Farmers and shepherds begin work at daybreak. Fields surround the village in a 2-5 km distance. At daybreak, with the call to prayer local farmers are on tractors and modern harvesters; lorries start rolling across the landscape loaded with migrant workers that include women and children. In the fields wheat and barley are checked for […]
A Short Tour of Yassıhöyük (Gordion) Village
By: Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann
Generally, when visitors arrive at Gordion, they see the monumental Midas Mound, the tomb of the Phrygian king, and the Museum where a collection of excavated artifacts are displayed. Next to the Museum is the tea-house, “çayevi”, where tea, cold drinks and freshly baked thin-layered crusty bread, (gözleme), and pita type bread (bazlama) are served […]
Meet Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann, Assistant Director of the Gordion Project
By: Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann
In 1995 I joined the Gordion Archaeological Project to study the socio-economic structure of the traditional villages in the region. The ultimate goal was to inform the ancient economic practices of the Phrygian kingdom, using the method of ethnographic analogy from the nearby contemporary villages, to help interpret the archaeological evidence. The ancient economy was […]