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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.

Hands-on Learning: Artifacts, Microscopes, X-Rays, and Chicken

By: James Moss

This past fall, Professor Kate Moore’s freshman seminar Food & Fire: Archaeology and the Laboratory was the first course taught for the Penn Museum’s new Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM). During the course of the semester, students had the opportunity to examine some of the Museum’s extensive archaeological collections, which have been […]

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Atlatl Battle

By: James Moss

Earlier this month, Penn students gathered at the Penn Museum to learn how to hunt dangerous big game just like their ancestors. Atlatl is a Nahuatl (Aztec) word for Spear-thrower, a tool used throughout the world, from the Middle Paleolithic up through today. First in a series of Making Workshops sponsored by the Museum’s new […]

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Penn Museum in Spain

By: James Moss

Last week, two couriers from Penn Museum, Assistant Archivist Eric Schnittke and Collections Assistant Jim Moss, traveled to Madrid, Spain to oversee the installation of 64 Near East and Babylonian objects along with 20 archival documents at CaixaForum Madrid. Antes del diluvio. Mesopotamia 3500-2100 aC (Before the Flood: Mesopotamia 3500-1200 BC) pulls together over 400 objects […]

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Uncrating a Masterpiece: The Lod Mosaic has Arrived!

By: James Moss

This past Saturday, January 26th, the centerpiece of our new exhibit, Unearthing a Masterpiece: A Roman Mosaic from Lod, Israel arrived and work began to set the pieces into place. The mosaic is so big, that it is shipped in 7 crates.  The crates themselves are so large, that they could not be brought in […]

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