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.
Report from the Field: Luang Prabang 1
By: Ardeth Abrams
In late December 2012, the fourth and final phase of the $300,000 Penn Museum Luce Program to Strengthen Southeast Asian Archaeology begins. Its focus is Luang Prabang Province, Laos, where the Museum’s Middle Mekong Archaeological Project (MMAP) has conducted surveys, test excavations and related multi-disciplinary studies since 2005. Nattha Chuenwattana, a Thai PhD student from […]
Bon Voyage, MMAP 2013!
By: Ardeth Abrams
In late December 2012, the fourth and final phase of the $300,000 Penn Museum Luce Program to Strengthen Southeast Asian Archaeology begins. Its focus is Luang Prabang Province, Laos, where the Museum’s Middle Mekong Archaeological Project (MMAP) has conducted surveys, test excavations and related multi-disciplinary studies since 2005. It’s been three years since the last […]
Penn Museum in Asia
By: Ardeth Abrams
Penn Museum has done archaeological research in Southeast Asia for the past 45 years. I have been lucky to work as an archaeological illustrator for one of the Penn projects, the Ban Chiang Project, since I was a grad student in the Penn Fine Arts School in 1990. Over the years I took on web […]
An ancient image of childbirth…TMI?
By: Ardeth Abrams
Photo by Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas A ceramic fragment less than 1 ¾” by 1 ¼” depicting the earliest known childbirth scene in western art was recently found in Italy. It shows the head and shoulders of a baby emerging from a mother who had her knees raised, her face in profile, and a […]
If these pots could talk…
By: Ardeth Abrams
Photo Caption: “If these pots could talk…” Illustration by Ardeth Anderson Abrams Penn Museum Scholars presents Joyce White, Associate Curator for Asia and Director of the Ban Chiang Project Marie-Claude Boileau, Postdoctoral Scholar in archaeological ceramics Wednesday, September 21st 12:30 pm • Classroom #2 Pottery excavated from the UNESCO World Heritage site of Ban Chiang, Thailand […]
Chet Gorman, Ban Chiang’s Wild Ginger Man
By: Ardeth Abrams
Chet surveying on a river in northern Thailand. A couple of months ago, I attended an evening talk at the Penn Museum where movies of the Ban Chiang Project’s first director, Chester Gorman, were part of the speaker’s PowerPoint presentation. As I watched the grainy images of Chester (a. k. a. Chet) Gorman excavating at […]
There’s a New Ceramics Lab in Town
By: Ardeth Abrams
Caption: Before, during, and after photos of our “flipped lab”. It wasn’t exactly like the show “Flip This House” but it was certainly fraught with emotional ups and downs as we waited for our new ceramics lab to be completed. There were many trips down the hall to the West Wing of the Museum to […]