Penn Museum
The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, branded as Penn Museum, is a 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
Penn Museum was founded in 1887 following a successful archaeological expedition to the ancient site of Nippur in modern-day Iraq. 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. Since 1958, the Penn Museum has published Expedition magazine. 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.
2009 restructuring
On November 19, 2008, the Penn Museum's administration terminated 18 Research Specialist positions in archaeological and anthropological research in the Mediterranean world, the Middle East, and Americas sections, effective May 31, 2009. The scientific research center MASCA was also closed, although the MASCA scientists moved to other Sections within the museum. The decision elicited widespread criticism among concerned scholars, who felt that it departed from the Penn Museum's historic mission as a research institution. Museum administrators attributed this measure to the 2008 financial crisis and the deep budget cuts that had resulted at the University of Pennsylvania. The museum's director at the time, Richard Hodges later offered positions as "Associate Curators" or "Research Project Managers" to eleven of the eighteen individuals affected. The museum affirmed its commitment to research, citing more than fifty active research projects spanning five continents that were engaging nearly 200 Museum-affiliated scholars—more than at any other archaeological and anthropological institute or museum in North America could claim at the time.Museum building
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 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. 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.The Coxe Memorial Egyptian Wing was added to the museum in 1924 through a bequest by former museum board president Eckley Coxe. The administrative wing was added in 1929. The Academic Wing, which provided laboratories for the Anthropology department and classrooms was opened in 1971. The most recent major addition was made in 2002, with the addition of the Mainwaring Wing.
Museum Library
The Museum Library was established in 1900 when the personal library of University of Pennsylvania professor of American archaeology and linguistics Daniel Garrison Brinton was acquired. This library contained an estimated 4,098 volumes of which the ethnology and linguistics of the American Indigenous peoples were the primary disciplines. This library also consists of a manuscript collection of nearly two hundred volumes relevant to the study of autochthonous Central American languages; most of which are either severely endangered or have completely disappeared. The original location of the library holdings was the Furness Building until they were transferred to the museum building in 1898. They were relocated to the Elkins Library up until 1971 upon when they were moved to their final home in the university extension of the museum.Prior to its move in 1971 the collection was built upon the support of museum curators contributing their personal monographs, negotiations with affiliate institutions here and abroad as well as endowments by philanthropic individuals.
The library collection was maintained by a staff comprising a single part-time librarian until 1942 when Cynthia Griffin became the first full-time librarian. It was under Griffin that the collection and library witnessed many developments. Prior to her arrival use of the library had been limited to employees of the museum and university professor; however, Griffin extended the accessibility to include students. She also augmented communication networks between the library and libraries worldwide. Within twenty years the library's collection more than doubled its capacity from nearly 20,000 volumes in 1945 to over 46,000 volumes in 1965, and by 1971 the breadth of the collection was well over 50,000 volumes increasing by 14,000 volumes annually.
The range of disciplines featured in the collection is specific to the museum itself and incorporates all divisions of anthropology and archaeology. There is a special emphasis on works published within the field of Mesoamerican archaeology as well as works which relate to the current research of the university's professors. As of 2008 there are approximately 115,000 volumes in the library's collection, 14,000 of these volumes have been circulated on an annual basis. The library also has subscriptions to an estimated 549 scholarly journals. Computing services within the library include desktop and laptop computers. Other services encompass a range of printing and scanning utilities as well as accommodating seating for 154 individuals. The library supports two quiet rooms for patron study, a space to examine photographs, a room designed specifically for microform research, and a collection of audio and video materials.
Collections
Penn Museum's extensive 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, Asia, Egypt, Europe, 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. None of the items in the physical anthropology collections are on display, but they are used for research.Ethnology and Archaeology Collections
Africa
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 museum has about 196 artifacts from the punitive Benin Expedition of 1897, including notably the Benin Bronzes, procured directly from British forces who had partaken in the expedition. The bronzes were restored after suffering damage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The museum has indicated that it's openness to deaccession and repatriate them.
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. 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.