By: Gareth Darbyshire and Gabriel H. Pizzorno
Gordion, in central Turkey, is the largest and longest-running of the Penn Museum’s many excavation projects. An ancient site of great historical significance, Gordion was occupied for 5,000 years from the Early Bronze Age (ca. 3000 BCE) through to modern times. Its high point was in the Iron Age (the early first millennium BCE) when […]
Around the World Every year, the Penn Museum’s curators and staff conduct research around the world. Read on for a small sampling of this work from the past year. New York & New Mexico Lucy Fowler Williams, Associate Curator and Sabloff Keeper in The American Section In support of the upcoming exhibition Native American Voices: […]
By: Richard Hodges
Classical Spies: America n Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece by Susan Heuck Allen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). 448 pp., 17 photographs, 2 maps, hardcover, $40.00, ISBN 978-0-472-11769-7 Archaeologists have long played a part in clandestine wartime adventures. Doubtless during the 1930s, the fellows of the American School of […]
By: Alessandro Pezzati
Reproductions of famous monuments were an important part of the Museum’s educational mission in its early years, before the increasing number of original objects displaced the plaster and bronze replicas. In this photograph from 1905 are important plaster casts, including the frieze of the Parthenon. Bronze sculptures, reproductions of originals discovered at Pompeii and Herculaneum, […]
By: Jean MacIntosh Turfa
“Lock of hair from the skull of the skeleton” was penned in a bold 19th century hand across the lid of an old yellow and red cardboard box used to store visiting cards. Crouching over the drawer, I pulled it out. Could it really hold ancient hair from an Italian tomb? Sometimes discoveries occur in […]
By: David R. Hernandez
For at least eight centuries, Roman generals marched in triumphal celebrations through the forum Romanum, the central town square of ancient Rome, to display to their fellow citizens booty and prisoners captured in military campaigns. The Roman Empire was a system built on the pursuit of plunder. The irony, of course, is that at no […]
By: Oliver Gilkes and Valbona Hysa
Butrint is a place of contrasts. The main archaeological site with its forum and public buildings—described by Virgil as “Lofty Buthrotum on the height”—is shrouded in trees, and is the haunt of exotic birds, butterflies, and woodland life. Just across the Vivari Channel that connects Lake Butrint to the deep blue Ionian Sea lie the […]
By: Kenneth Kitchell
Most people are familiar with the strong character of Penelope, who waited at Ithaca while her husband Odysseus was away 20 long years. In Homer’s Odyssey we watch in admiration as she holds together Odysseus’ kingdom and keeps a horde of suitors at bay until he returns. But many readers quickly pass over the fact […]
By: Charles K. Williams, II
The greek theater of ancient Corinth was reconstructed by the Romans when they re-established the destroyed city as Colonia Laus Julia Corinthiensis in 44 BC. At that time they redesigned the theater to Roman specifications, adding a free-standing single-room hall at either end of the new stage building. It is the hall at the west […]
By: Jacob Morton
Reviewed by Jacob Morton, Ph.D. student in the Graduate Group in Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania. This valuable book seeks to address a series of questions that have come to occupy an important place in contemporary ethical discussions: Are humans different from all other animals? Ought humans to treat these other animals with justice […]