User:Coryannyyz/University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

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The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology—commonly known as the Penn Museum—is an archaeology and anthropology museum at the University of Pennsylvania. It is located on Penn's campus in the University City neighborhood of Philadelphia, at the intersection of 33rd and South Streets. Housing over 1.3 million artifacts, the museum features one of the most comprehensive collections of middle and near-eastern art in the world.

History

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology—which has conducted more than 300 archaeological and anthropological expeditions around the world—was founded during the administration of Provost William Pepper. In 1887, Provost Pepper persuaded the trustees of the University of Pennsylvania to erect a fireproof building to house artifacts from an upcoming expedition to the ancient site of Nippur in modern-day Iraq (then part of the Ottoman Empire). During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, North American and European museums regularly sponsored such excavations throughout the Mediterranean and Near East, sharing the ownership of their discoveries with the host country. Penn Museum followed this practice in acquiring the vast majority of its collections, and, as a result, most of the museum's objects have a known archaeological context, increasing their value for archaeological and anthropological research and presentation.

Today the museum's three floors of gallery space feature materials from the ancient Mediterranean World, Egypt, the Near East, Mesopotamia, East Asia, and Mesoamerica, as well as artifacts from the indigenous peoples of Africa and Native America. Since 1958, the Penn Museum has published Expedition magazine. (ISSN 0014-4738) The excavations and collections of the museum provide resources for student research and the museum hosts the Graduate Group in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World.

Collections

Mexico and Central America

Coclé gold plaque or pectoral from Sitio Conte, Panama

Penn Museum's Mesoamerican collections include objects from Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama and Costa Rica. The American Section's ethnographic collections from Mesoamerica include strong collections of masks, ceramics, and textiles from Guatemala, and very small collections from Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. In Guatemala, Robert Burkitt acquired ethnographic ceramics, textiles, tools, hammocks, fans and gourds from the Alta Verapaz the early twentieth century.

The museum houses the outstanding Lilly de Jongh Osborne collection of 19th and early 20th century Guatemalan textiles, exceptional because of its complete outfits for men, women and children acquired systematically across different Guatemalan villages. This collection includes raw material and other objects and tools related to weaving. Ruben Reina studied the production of ceramics in Guatemala in the 1960s and 1970s, and collected ceramics and textiles from the region. The Section houses a large collection of Guatemalan masks amassed by James Moore in the 1960s.

The Penn Museum conducted an excavation of the Mayan city of Tikal, Guatemala from 1956 to 1970. Many important artifacts from this excavation are on view in the museum, along with several stelae from the contemporary cities of Caracol and Piedras Negras. The gallery also displays many Aztecan, Oaxacan, and Teotihuacano artifacts.

On November 16, 2019, the Penn Museum launched a new exhibit entitled "The Mexico and Central America Gallery." This gallery features art and artifacts from eight Central American countries, including Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Specifically, one object of importance that is on display is Stela 14, a limestone rock with intricate carvings that stands at ten feet tall. Tatiana Proskouriakoff excavated this object in Piedras Negras, and at the time of its discovery, archaeologists could not decipher the Mayan hieroglyphics engraved in it. Proskouriakoff cross-referenced the glyphs on the Stela to historical events, eventually decoding the hieroglyphic language. Proskouriakoff's discovery transformed the field of Maya Studies.

South America

The museum's South American collections are as varied as the regions from which they come – the arid coast of Peru, the Andean Highlands, and the tropical lowlands of the Amazon Basin. The collections include ethnological and archaeological materials from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela.

The first expedition to South America was headed up by William Curtis Farabee, whose reputation was built upon an expedition to Peru he led for the Peabody Museum at Harvard. After being appointed curator of the American Section in 1913, he led a three year expedition to Brazil and British Guiana during which his team collected over 300 ethnological artifacts and produced over 300 photographs. These were accompanied by Farabee's 13 journals recording the cultural and physical characteristics of the Arawak and Carib tribes. During a second expedition in 1922-1923, Farabee focused on the Inca and pre-Inca empires of Peru, adding substantially to the museum's South American archaeology collections before his untimely death in 1925.

The American Section's ethnographic holdings from South America are strongest in materials from Bolivia, Brazil, Guyana, and Peru. The Aymara, Quechua, and Yuracaré of Bolivia are represented in early collections acquired by Max Uhle and William Curtis Farabee. More than thirty indigenous tribes from Brazil are represented in ethnographic collections acquired by Farabee and Vincenzo M. Petrullo in the 1920s and 1930s respectfully. Twelve different indigenous groups are represented in the collections acquired in Guyana by Farabee in the 1920s. More than twenty-five native groups from Peru are represented as well. Smaller collections represent some of the indigenous peoples of Argentina (Yahgan), Chile (Alacaluf, Mapuche), Colombia (Arhuaco, Chocó, Goajira, and Kogi), and Ecuador (Jívaro, Tumaco, Saparo).

Egypt

Merneptah presents an offering to Ptah on a stone column (University of Pennsylvania Museum)

The museum's collection of Egyptian artifacts is considered one of the finest in the world. The museum's Egyptian galleries house an extensive collection of statuary, mummies, and reliefs. Most notably, the museum houses a set of architectural elements, including large columns and a 13-ton granite Sphinx of Ramesses II, circa 1200 B.C., from the palace of the Pharaoh Merenptah. These were excavated by a museum expedition to Egypt in 1915. In the late 1970s Karl-Theodor Zauzich (attendant of the Egyptian section) discovered 3 missing fragments of the Insinger Papyrus in the museum's collections.

Europe (Etruscan, Greece and Rome)

The

Mediterranean

This section includes Cathage/Tunisia.

Middle East

Iraq

The museum's most important collection is arguably that of the Royal Tombs of Ur, which The University of Pennsylvania co–excavated with the British Museum in Iraq. Ur was an important and wealthy city-state in ancient Sumer, and the artifacts from its royal tombs showcase the city's wealth. The collections consists of a variety of crowns, figures, and musical instruments, many of which have been inlaid with gold and precious stones. The often traveling collection includes a well known Bull-headed lyre. The museum's Babylonian section houses a collection of almost 30,000 clay tablets inscribed in Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform, making it one of the ten largest collections in the world. The collection contains the largest number of Sumerian school tablets and literary compositions of any of the world's museums, as well as important administrative archives ranging from 2900 to 500 BCE.

Oceania

The blah blah

The Physical Anthropology Collections

The

The Morton Collection

The Penn Museum holds approximately 1,300 skulls collected by 19th century physician Samuel George Morton. The museum acquired the collection from the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1966. Morton has long been criticized for promoting white supremacist views, leveraging science to uphold racism, poor research quality, and unethically collecting human remains without consent. Despite this, the museum claims the collection is an important historic and research resource. The museum has actively conducted research using the collection in recent years. More than a dozen crania, along with mid-19th century measuring devices, were on public display at the museum from 2012 to 2013 in an exhibit named "Year of Proof: Making and Unmaking Race". In 2018, students in the Penn and Slavery project discovered the collection includes 55 crania of enslaved people, with 53 of these crania from Havana and 2 from the United States. In July, 2020 the museum announced it would move the collection from a private classroom into storage after criticism from students and the local community. The museum is also planning to repatriate or rebury skulls of enslaved individuals.

Public Engagement

Television and Radio

Penn Museum was involved in the CBS television show What in the World?