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.
A Conservation “Vacation”
By: Molly Gleeson
For three weeks in April, we had an intern working with us in the Conservation Department, specifically, with me in the Artifact Lab. I hesitate to call her an intern because this “intern” is someone who has at least ten more years of experience than I do as a conservator. In fact, she was one of […]
Confronting Death at the Penn Museum
By: Molly Gleeson
After three years of working on ancient Egyptian mummies In the Artifact Lab, I’ve gotten used to being around death every day. And, in reality, all of us here at the Museum are surrounded by death – many artifacts in our collection were excavated from tombs and relate to funerary practices and provide intimate connections […]
Ask Us Anything!
By: Tom Stanley
Open since September of 2012, the Museum’s ongoing In the Artifact Lab: Conserving Egyptian Mummies exhibition continues to be a big point of interest and engagement among our visitors. In case you’re not familiar with In the Artifact Lab, the concept is pretty simple: it’s a combination of an exhibition and a working conservation lab. […]
Questions from the Artifact Lab: collecting and acquisitions at the Penn Museum
By: Molly Gleeson
In the Artifact Lab: Conserving Egyptian Mummies has been open for almost a year, and it has been an exciting year, busy with new discoveries, complex conservation treatments, and many conversations with our visitors who we speak with daily during our open window chat sessions. As you can imagine, we field a wide range of […]
National Poetry Month, Week 1
By: Jennifer Reifsteck
The month of April is a month full of dedications – everything from Fools (April 1) to Administrative Professionals (April 24) and even the whole Earth itself (April 22) receive a special day. My personal favorite celebration for April is National Poetry Month. Back in February, second graders from Abington School District visited the Penn […]
Special visitor in the Artifact Lab
By: Molly Gleeson
If you ask me, there is always something interesting going on in the Artifact Lab, and yesterday was no exception. If you have been following the Artifact Lab blog, you will know that we have been working on one of the mummies in our collection, who we refer to as PUM I. PUM stands for […]
Microscopy and mummy bits: updates from the Artifact Lab
By: Molly Gleeson
In the Artifact Lab: Conserving Egyptian Mummies opened on September 30 and we have since been very busy-not only working on examining and treating objects from our Egyptian collection, but also speaking with the public on a daily basis. We had a big crowd for the 125th Anniversary open house, and some of our busiest […]
Mummies on the move!
By: Molly Gleeson
No, the mummies haven’t come to life-that only happens in the movies (think the 1932 original “The Mummy”). We are in the final stages of preparing In the Artifact Lab for the opening on Sunday, September 30, and we’re moving several mummies and other objects from storage to their new digs up on the 3rd […]
Prep-work for In the Artifact Lab
By: Molly Gleeson
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Conservators work hard to prevent things from deteriorating, but we occasionally like to destroy things (gasp!). Maybe it’s because we have devoted so much of our lives to saving things, or maybe it’s because we normally have to tend to such minute details so carefully […]
The Artifact Lab takes shape
By: Lynn Grant
Last week the preparations for the Artifact Lab (see my previous post) really began to gather speed. On Monday, Molly Gleeson the project conservator arrived and was immediately plunged into the preparations. Molly, a graduate of the UCLA/Getty program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials, has experience and interest in public outreach regarding […]