Archaeology and anthropology museum featuring materials from the ancient Mediterranean World, Egypt, the Near East, Mesopotamia, East Asia, and Mesoamerica
General Information
Senior (65 and over with ID): $16.00
Youth (Ages 6-17) $13.00
Children (5 and under): FREE
How to Get There
Head south on S 15th St toward S Penn Square. S 15th St turns slightly left and becomes S Penn Square. Slight right onto S Broad St/Ave Of The Arts. Turn right onto Lombard St. Lombard St turns left and becomes S 27th St. Turn right onto South St/S St Bridge Continue to follow South St. Turn left.
Overview
Penn Museum, formerly known as The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 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 was founded in 1887 following a successful archaeological expedition to the ancient site of Nippur in modern-day Iraq (then part of the Ottoman Empire). Provost William Pepper persuaded the trustees of the University of Pennsylvania to erect a fireproof building to house artifacts from the excavation. 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. Since its beginning, the Penn Museum's scientists have conducted more than 300 archaeological and anthropological expeditions around the world.
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.
The museum is housed in an Arts and Crafts and Eclectic style building that is one of the landmarks of the University of Pennsylvania campus. The existing original building (onto which have been grafted several later additions) is actually only approximately one-third of an ambitious design that would have created one of the largest museum buildings in the United States. Features of the extant building include a dramatic rotunda, multiple courtyards and gardens, a fountain, reflecting pool, glass mosaics, iron gates, and stone statuary. The Penn Museum was designed by a team of Philadelphia architects, all of whom taught on the faculty of the university: Wilson Eyre, Cope & Stewardson and Frank Miles Day. The first phase was completed in 1899 and housed the discoveries from an expedition sponsored by the university to the ancient site of Nippur. The rotunda, which houses the Harrison Auditorium, was completed in 1915. Charles Klauder designed the Coxe Memorial Wing, which opened in 1926 to house the museum's Egyptian collection. The Sharpe Wing was completed in 1929.
Penn Museum's extensive collections fall into three main divisions: archaeology, the artifacts recovered from the past by excavation, ethnology, the objects and ideas collected from living peoples, and physical anthropology, the physical remains of humans and nonhuman primates. For curation and display, the items in the archaeology and ethnology collections are organized by geographic regions. As of 2023, there are eleven permanent galleries: Africa, Asia, Egypt, Sphinx, Middle East, Eastern Mediterranean, Etruscan, Greece, Rome, Native American Voices and Mexico and Central America. The collections are organized along similar lines, but with larger geographic groupings for some regions. Collection areas include Africa, America (North, Central and South), Asia, Egypt, Europe (Etruscan, Greece and Rome), Mediterranean, Near East and Oceania. Many items within these collections are not on display in the permanent galleries, but may be used for research and temporary exhibits.
The Penn Museum has one of the largest collections of African ethnographic and archaeological objects in the country. Mostly obtained from 1891 to 1937, the collection contains objects from all regions of Africa, but with a concentration from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Angola, Morocco, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Madagascar.
The Penn Museum has one of the most extensive Sherbro Island collections in the world. During a museum sponsored expedition in 1936-1937, Curator of General Ethnology, Henry Usher Hall spent seven months conducting ethnographic research among the Sherbro people of Sierra Leone. The collection consists of textiles, sculpture, artifacts related to subsistence and household items, secret society and examples of medicine bundles. Hall's papers include field notes, bibliographies, and textual commentaries that provide ethnographic information about the way of life of the Sherbro people and others—including the Mende, Krim, and Temne peoples—who lived among them.
The Central African collection includes approximately 3000 artifacts from the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly the Belgian Congo). The majority of these artifacts were collected by the German ethnographer Leo Viktor Frobenius on his expedition to the Kasai district of the Congo in 1906. His collection illustrates the diverse sculptural forms found among the different cultural groups in the Central African region. Some of the cultures represented in the collection are the Kuba, Kongo, Luba, Suku, Yaka, Pende, Teke, Chokwe, and Luluwa. One of the lesser known collection within the African Section is the Moroccan collection. Dr. and Mrs. Talcott Williams travelled to Morocco in 1898 and returned with approximately 600 objects to document the cultures in Morocco. The collection consists of clothing, shoes, rugs, blankets, weapons, jewelry, pottery, baskets, cooking pots. This thorough collection of objects representing daily life was well documented by Dr. Williams who also collected on behalf of the Smithsonian.
On November 16, 2019, the Penn Museum debuted a newly renovated African gallery alongside many other new galleries and rooms. Penn professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Dr. Tufuku Zuberi, was appointed as the head curator for the new Africa exhibit, and approached his former student Breanna Moore about designing a new dress for the gallery. Moore enlisted the help of her friend and Philadelphia artist, Emerson Ruffin, to create the dress titled “Wearable Literature”, now a popular item in the Penn Museum's African galleries.
The North American archaeological collections contain heritage items from twenty thousand years old to a few hundred years old. In the 1960s, these were arranged chronologically. Some of these items were excavated in the late 19th century and early 20th century, while others were purchased or donated by reputable collectors. In 1896, Frank Hamilton Cushing excavated wolf, deer and human masquettes that he found in the waters off of Key Marco, Florida. The masquettes were unfortunately distorted upon removal from the water, but they and the numerous tools and practical items had an unusually high level of preservation due to their underwater location. In the interwar years, Edgar B. Howard excavated some of the oldest items in the collection from the American Southwest. His excavations in 1932 and 1933 near Clovis, New Mexico, are significant in identifying the Clovis Point, and in proving the co-existence of humans and extinct animals such as the bison and mammoth.
The North American ethnographic holdings number approximately 40,000 heritage items attributed to approximately 200 Indigenous nations and organized within eleven geographic regions (Arctic, Sub-Arctic, Northwest Coast, Plateau, California, Great Basin, Southwest, Great Plains, Southeast and Northeast). The strongest collections are those systematically created via ethnographic collecting expeditions in Alaska, the Northwest Coast, Southwest, Southeast, and Sub-arctic regions. Many of the Northwest Coast materials were collected in the early 20th century by Louis Shotridge, the son of an influential Tlingit chiefly family. Penn Museum director George Byron Gordon hired Shotridge as a curator. He worked for the museum in various capacities between 1912 and 1932, including multiple field expeditions sponsored by John Wanamaker. Prominent ethnographers of the time also contributed to the North American collections. As a professor and chair of the anthropology department at the University of Pennsylvania, Frank Gouldsmith Speck was one of the most prolific donors to the museum's Sub-Arctic ethnology collections. In addition, Speck was an early adopter of audio recording technology with which he gathered examples of Creek and Yuchi songs. Individual donations significantly contribute to the collections in many areas.
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.
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 anthropological materials from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela.
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).
The Penn Museum's Asian collection is composed of close to 3,000 objects of art and artifacts from China, Tibet, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, India and other Asian countries. The Penn Museum acquired another important Asian collection from amateur collectors William and Isabel Ingram Mayer who made a collecting expedition across Mongolia and northern China in 1930-1931. The Mayer Collection consists of 464 small bronze daggers, harnesses, plaques, and a variety of ornaments that represent the "Ordos" style made by the Scythians and related nomadic peoples between the 12th century BCE and 3rd century CE, as well as some metalworks of more recent origin. Maxwell Sommerville (1829-1904), one of the first curators at the Penn Museum, contributed many items from Japan and India including a set of Kalighat paintings from India that represent almost the entire Hindu pantheon.
The Asian Gallery is mounted in Harrison Rotunda, which measures ninety feet across and ninety feet from the floor. Since its completion in 1915, this gallery has showcased the Chinese collection. One of the central figures is a ceramic statue of a Luohan, reputed to be one of a group of eight or ten statues from a cave in Yizhou that date between 947 and 1234 CE. Other rare Chinese works of art on display are two of the six horse panels from Emperor Taizong's Mausoleum in Shaanxi Province. Each of these horses had names and poems commemorating their service in the fight to unify China during the Tang dynasty. The secular focus and historic realism of these reliefs marked a new direction in Chinese art.
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.
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.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Penn Museum", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0
