As Penn Museum celebrates its 120th year of activity, we still take seriously our original trifold mission of cutting-edge archaeological and anthropological research and publication, responsible collection stewardship, and high-quality public education and outreach. Expedition, now beginning its 49th volume, continues to be at the forefront of these efforts, with its coverage of the Museum’s field and laboratory work, the objects—both exotic and mundane—in the Museum’s collection, and Museum exhibits.
Penn Museum has just launched the “Year of Egypt” with our new exhibition, Amarna, Ancient Egypt’s Place in the Sun, in the newly refurbished (and air conditioned!) gallery off the main Lower Egyptian gallery, and a host of related programming, including lectures, seminars, and family events. The beautiful volume, Akhenaten & Tutankhamun: Revolution and Restoration, by David P. Silverman, Josef W. Wegner, and Jennifer Houser Wegner, accompanies the exhibit. We also have just published Irene Bald Romano’s remarkable new book, Classical Sculpture: Catalogue of the Cypriot, Greek, and Roman Stone Sculpture in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, an outgrowth of the Museum’s “Worlds Intertwined” reinstallation of our Greek, Etruscan, and Roman galleries.
Our world-wide research—from Oman to New Mexico, from Bolivia to Mongolia, from Honduras to Turkey, and from Laos to Vineland, New Jersey, among many others—continues apace, as does our training of Penn undergraduate and graduate students. Since its opening in 2002, our new Mainwaring Wing for Collections Storage and Study has been heavily used by our own staff and students, as well as by visitors and researchers. When we opened the new wing, our hopes were high. I wrote then: “This is a dream realized, not only for the Museum and for researchers, but for the entire community. The international collections . . . are a part of our shared human heritage and the Museum holds them in trust, for research, education and exhibition development for generations to come.” Fortunately, these hopes have been fulfilled, and the wing has become a model for other museums, which regularly send staff to see how and why it functions so well.
The Museum’s future also promises to be very exciting with the forthcoming completion of a master plan for its long-term architectural transformation and the ongoing creation of a new strategic work plan, both projects initiated by Dr. Richard M. Leventhal. The master plan, a joint effort of David Chipperfield Architects and Atkin, Olshin, Lawson-Bell Architects, will provide a long-range architectural blueprint designed to transform and strengthen all three key aspects of the Museum’s mission—research, collections management, and public outreach—while the strategic work plan offers a solid road map for strengthening the Museum’s many activities in the immediate future. Our staff is also hard at work on an ambitious traveling exhibit on human evolution and its consequences for us today—“Surviving: The Body of Evidence”—that will open here in early 2008.
I hope that you will enjoy this new issue of Expedition, visit our new Amarna exhibit, and join us for the many “Year of Egypt” and other Museum events, including our 25th annual Maya Weekend, April 13–15, 2007.
Jeremy A. Sabloff, Ph.D.
Interim Director