Meet the Curators

By: Deborah I. Olszewski

Rebecca Huss-Ashmore, Associate Curator-in­Charge of Penn Mus­eum’s Physical Anthropology Section, has traveled nearly full circle in her career. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, she majored in German, with a minor in American Literature, but also took anthropol­ogy classes. These included a course taught by Oscar Lewis, who one day unexpectedly asked her […]

From the Director

By: Richard M. Leventhal

In this issue I want to take a break from discussing the Penn Museum and note the passing of an individual of great importance to all Native peoples and those who study indigenous peoples. Vine Deloria, Jr., a Native American activist, author, historian, and theologian, died on November 13, 2005. During the course of his […]

By: James R. Mathieu

Welcome to the first issue of Expedition for 2006! We are pleased to present an eclectic issue covering a wide range of topics, from the anthropology of movies, high fashion, and tourism to the archaeology of prehistoric stone use and the origins of agriculture. Our feature articles begin on the big screen, where movies are […]

Research Notes

By: Janet Chrzan

The first time I heard about the academic study of tourism—an undergraduate course the University of California at Berkeley entitled the “Anthropology of Tourism”— I thought it was a joke. While I never took the class, unfortunately, now, 20 years later, I have devoured the writings of that particular pro­fessor and many others, while seeking […]

Research Notes

By: Olivia Given and Shawn Hyla

Peoples living in mainland Southeast Asia during the middle Holocene (ca. 6000 – 2000 BC) made some profound subsistence and technological changes. One of the most interesting and mysterious involved their transition from an exclusively hunting and gathering lifestyle to an existence dominated by agriculture, including the cultivation of rice. Archaeologists have many questions about […]

Clues to Prehistoric Resource Use in Jordan

By: Deborah I. Olszewski and Maysoon al-Nahar

Scattered Across the world on the surface and in buried deposits are billions of prehistoric stone arti­facts the most durable evidence of humanity’s past 2.6 million years. Public interest and research on such artifacts often focuses on the forms of arrowheads, handaxes, drills, and other recognizable tools and on how they were made by prehistoric […]

Book News & Reviews

By: Beebe Bahrami

Bear Daughter by Judith Berman (New York: Ace Books, 2005). 422 pp., paper $16.00 ISBN 0441013228. Reviewed by Beebe Bahrami, a Cultural Anthropologist and a Writer of Fiction and Creative Non-fiction. If you have long awaited the next book from Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand ofDarkness, The Earthsea Cycle) or Mary Doria Russell (The […]

Exhibit Notes

By: James McClelland

The international touring exhibition Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs will end its tour of the U.S. next year at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, February 3 to September 30, 2007. David P. Silverman, a guiding light during the first King Tut exhibition in the 1970s and the Penn Museum’s Curator-in-Charge of the Egyptian Section, […]

People, Places, Projects

Penn Museum Announces Architect for Master Plan On November 11, 2005, following an international search, Penn Museum announced the appointment of renowned British architect David Chipperfield to develop a comprehen­sive new master plan to take the Museum, its complex histori­cal building, and its international research, collections, and educational outreach into the 21st century. Other museum […]

Surprising Connection from New Guinea

By: Stuart Kirsch

How can a woman’s hat made in New York City (ca. 1915) and decorated with iridescent bird of paradise plumes from New Guinea affect our understanding of history? What relationships were responsible for its creation? What do such relationships reveal about New Guinea and its connections to the rest of the world? How might the […]