By: Josh

Philadelphia ethnographer Stewart Culin worked as director of the Penn Museum from 1892 to 1903 and was instrumental in acquiring the Historic Games Collection. After his time here, Culin became a curator at the Brooklyn Museum and helped establish their African gallery. A recent New York Times article has more on the subject and the […]

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By: Josh

From the Watson Kintner Collection. More info.

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By: Josh

Meet the “Yingpan Man”. He is on display as part of our Secrets of the Silk Road exhibition which runs through March 15th with all mummies and artifacts. His mysterious smile has been compared to that of the Mona Lisa… What am I thinking? Submit your caption as a comment on Facebook and we’ll pick […]

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By: Josh

Hi! Social Media Josh here. Just got done my lunch break and decided to hop upstairs and pay a visit to the Secrets of the Silk Road Exhibition. The staff here really did an amazing job. The atmosphere, artifacts, music and mummies provide an experience that can’t be matched. The interactive portions all provide hands-on […]

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By: Josh

Victor Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Penn, lends his expertise to this short documentary from National Geographic. Make sure to visit the Secrets of the Silk Road exhibit at the Penn Museum opening February 5th.

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By: Amy Ellsworth

In Righteous Dopefiend: Homelessness, Addiction and Poverty in Urban America, anthropologist Philippe Bourgois and photographer-ethnographer Jeff Schonberg document the daily lives of homeless drug users, drawing upon more than a decade of fieldwork they conducted among a community of heroin injectors and crack smokers who survive on the streets of San Francisco’s former industrial neighborhoods. […]

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By: Bea Jarocha-Ernst

Every day that something cool comes out of our archives image database is a good day.  There are just so many amazing photos from years gone by relating to all sorts of stuff! Most recently we came across this gem. The Development Office’s awesome intern, Jessica, has been putting together some marketing and outreach letter […]

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By: Maureen Callahan

It’s been a week chock-full of crazy here in the archives (my woo-woo friends tell me that Mercury is retrograde, plus it’s been a full moon. If that means anything).  Sometimes, when I’m having a hard day, I go through our database and just try to find cute photos.  So here we are.

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By: Maureen Callahan

We’ve all been told that anthropologists have no right to intervene in the lives of their subjects — does it make a difference if their subjects are small, green, and promise not to tattle? Frank Goldsmith Speck, near the end of his career at Penn, befriended John Witthoft, a young colleague of his. The two […]

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By: Alison Miner

While this appears to be a picture of a visiting muppet, in actuality it is a Cherokee man, wearing a mask for the ceremonial Booger Dance.

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