As someone who comes to work every day at the Penn Museum, it can feel like our permanent galleries and special exhibitions are my coworkers. I know what they look like and where I can find them, and I know there is always more to learn about them each time I walk by.
What I can’t anticipate from one day to the next are the people who visit the Museum. Class trips and family vacations. History buffs and art lovers. Renowned scholars and international authors. As these people walk through our Museum, they don’t just look at the objects in front of them—they look at one another, and they talk about what they’re seeing. These conversations are the soundtrack of our Museum.
In a staff-only hallway behind the Rome Gallery, there are two rooms that remain relatively quiet: the Tikal Archives. These rooms hold troves of documents from one of Guatemala’s most important Maya sites, which the Museum excavated in the 1950s and ’60s. One day last fall, I noticed a group of seven people sitting inside the Tikal archives. A smiling man named Alejandro Puga greeted me: “This is my family. We are from Tikal, and our grandfather worked with the Penn Museum for many years.”
For Alejandro, the Museum showed his family another side of their homeland (p. 4). He spent the day reading letters his grandfather had written to Museum archaeologists, and his relatives selected dozens of photos to be scanned by the Penn Museum Archives. In Guatemala, Alejandro’s family operates a hotel inside the remote rainforests of Tikal National Park. This allows tourists to visit a tough-to-access UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Meanwhile, I recently spoke with two researchers from Mexico who came to the Museum on the final stop of a global research tour. They were studying codices made by their ancestors in the Mixtec region of southern Mexico. Only a handful of these codices still exist, and the Mexican Consulate organized a visit for the researchers to see one at the Penn Museum, which we’ll share more about in the next issue of Expedition. When I asked why it was important to see the codex in person, researcher Omar Aguilar Sánchez told me: “When I look at the codices, it’s more than just academic, scientific, or artistic—it is for my own life and my own culture. When I see them in-person, it is very powerful for me. It feeds my soul.”
Whether you visit us in Philadelphia to see our galleries up-close, or you read the stories in Expedition and on our new blog Penn Museum Voices (pennmuseum.org/blog), we hope the Museum can spark conversations between you and the people in your life—and help you see how your own story fits into the larger history of humankind.
QUINN RUSSELL BROWN, EDITOR