Archives Photo of the Week: Fun Find
By: Eric Schnittke
Every so often, you stumble across an oddity in the archives. This week, I found something that piqued my interest. A researcher was visiting the archives, looking through records from Erich Schmidt’s expedition to Persepolis, Iran. Part of this particular collection is a set of photo albums containing prints that Schmidt had collected during his […]
Archives Photo of the Week: Halloween
By: Eric Schnittke
Halloween was yesterday and the Penn Museum Archives wanted to leave you with one last treat for the holiday. One of the spookiest images in our collection, this photo is of a cow’s skull mounted on a stick to act as a scarecrow in Damghan, Iran. Damghan is near the site Tepe Hissar, where the […]
Archives Photo of the Week: Baseball
By: Eric Schnittke
With baseball’s World Series starting this week, it’s fitting to pay tribute to the Fall Classic with the Photo of the Week. Featured in this image is a baseball team from an indemnity school, most likely Tsinghua College in Peking, China. Tsinghua College (now Tsinghua University) was created as a preparatory school as part of the Boxer […]
Archives Photo of the Week: Mummy Bundles
By: Eric Schnittke
This week’s photo of the week comes from Pachacamac in Peru. The Penn Museum excavations at Pachacamac were led by Max Uhle, a German philologist and archaeologist who was continuing the work that he had undertaken for the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. Uhle’s explorations of South America lasted from 1895 to 1897. Featured in the image are […]
Archives Photo of the Week: Sphinx
By: Eric Schnittke
You may have to squint, but this week’s archives photo of the week is still important. This image is the only known photograph of the Penn Museum’s Sphinx en route to Cairo for shipping to Philadelphia. The photo was sent by Flinders Petrie to then museum director George Byron Gordon. The 15-ton statue of Ramesses II […]
Archives Photo of the Week: Bhutia Girl
By: Eric Schnittke
This week’s photo features an image collected by William Furness, III., Alfred C. Harrison, Jr., and Hiram M. Hiller. Between 1895 and 1901, the three men traveled across Oceania and Asia, collecting substantial amounts of ethnological, archaeological, and skeletal materials. Included in their collecting were many photographic materials, including this week’s photo of the week. This […]
Archives Photo of the Week
By: Eric Schnittke
This week’s photo features an image from the Penn Museum’s excavations at Tikal in Guatemala. William Coe, former curator of the American Section at the museum, captured the excavation of an upside-down face sculpture in Structure 34 of the North Acropolis at Tikal. This image is featured in Archivist Alessandro Pezzati’s book Adventures in Photography: Expeditions of the […]
Wake Me Up When The Summer Ends
By: Eric Schnittke
With summer starting to fade to fall, the Penn Museum gladly says goodbye to the heat and discomfort of this past summer. The Archives would like to send off the season in the right way, with a look back at how the museum used to deal with its visitors during the heat (operative words: used […]
“Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat…”
By: Eric Schnittke
The holiday season is fast approaching and mailmen and women across the country will be taking to the streets to deliver packages. They are known for delivering through even the harshest of weather and in Point Barrow, Alaska that is no exception. This image from 1897 depicts a US mailman and his sled dog team […]