, from the report on the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Penn Museum, 1900. Illustration by
M. Louise Baker. Penn Museum's extensive collections 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 (North, Central and South), Asia, Egypt, Europe (Etruscan, Greece and Rome), 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 (formerly the Belgian 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.
North America The
North American archaeological collections contain heritage items from twenty thousand years old to a few hundred years old. In the 1960s, these were arranged chronologically. Some of these items were excavated in the late 19th century and early 20th century, while others were purchased or donated by reputable collectors. In 1896,
Frank Hamilton Cushing excavated wolf, deer and human masquettes that he found in the waters off of Key Marco, Florida. The masquettes were unfortunately distorted upon removal from the water, but they and the numerous tools and practical items had an unusually high level of preservation due to their underwater location. In the interwar years, Edgar B. Howard excavated some of the oldest items in the collection from the
American Southwest. The North American ethnographic holdings number approximately 40,000 heritage items attributed to approximately 200 Indigenous nations and organized within eleven geographic regions (Arctic, Sub-Arctic, Northwest Coast, Plateau, California, Great Basin, Southwest, Great Plains, Southeast and Northeast). The strongest collections are those systematically created via ethnographic collecting expeditions in Alaska, the Northwest Coast, Southwest, Southeast, and Sub-arctic regions. Many of the Northwest Coast materials were collected in the early 20th century by
Louis Shotridge, the son of an influential Tlingit chiefly family. Prominent ethnographers of the time also contributed to the North American collections. As a professor and chair of the anthropology department at the
University of Pennsylvania,
Frank Gouldsmith Speck was one of the most prolific donors to the museum's Sub-Arctic ethnology collections. In addition, Speck was an early adopter of audio recording technology with which he gathered examples of Creek and Yuchi songs. Specifically, one object of importance that is on display is Stela 14, a limestone rock with intricate carvings that stands at ten feet tall.
Tatiana Proskouriakoff excavated this object in Piedras Negras, and at the time of its discovery, archaeologists could not decipher the Mayan hieroglyphics engraved in it. Proskouriakoff cross-referenced the glyphs on the Stela to historical events, eventually decoding the hieroglyphic language. Proskouriakoff's discovery transformed the field of Maya Studies.
South America The museum's
South American collections are as varied as the regions from which they come – the arid coast of Peru, the Andean Highlands, and the tropical lowlands of the Amazon Basin. The collections include anthropological materials from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela. The American Section's ethnographic holdings from South America are strongest in materials from Bolivia, Brazil, Guyana, and Peru. The
Aymara,
Quechua, and
Yuracaré of Bolivia are represented in early collections acquired by
Max Uhle and
William Curtis Farabee. More than thirty indigenous tribes from
Brazil are represented in ethnographic collections acquired by Farabee and Vincenzo M. Petrullo in the 1920s and 1930s respectfully. Twelve different indigenous groups are represented in the collections acquired in
Guyana by Farabee in the 1920s. More than twenty-five native groups from Peru are represented as well. Smaller collections represent some of the indigenous peoples of Argentina (
Yahgan), Chile (
Alacaluf,
Mapuche), Colombia (
Arhuaco,
Chocó,
Goajira, and
Kogi), and Ecuador (
Jívaro,
Tumaco, Saparo).
Asia The Penn Museum's Asian collection is composed of close to 30,000 objects of art and artifacts from China, Tibet, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, India and other Asian countries. Through the concerted efforts of Dr.
George Byron Gordon, the majority of the collection on display focuses on China. From 1914-1918 and again in 1923-1924, Penn Museum archaeologists attempted archaeological expeditions in China that ended in failure. Consequently, the vast majority of the Chinese collection was purchased or donated through dealers in North America. Nevertheless, it includes a significant number of high quality works of antiquity. The Penn Museum acquired an important Asian collection from amateur collectors William and Isabel Ingram Mayer who made a collecting expedition across Mongolia and northern China in 1930-1931. The Mayer Collection consists of 464 small bronze daggers, harnesses, plaques, and a variety of ornaments that represent the "Ordos" style made by the
Scythians and related nomadic peoples between the 12th century BCE and 3rd century CE, as well as some metalworks of more recent origin. Maxwell Sommerville (1829-1904), one of the first curators at the Penn Museum, contributed many items from Japan and India including a set of
Kalighat paintings from India that represent almost the entire Hindu pantheon. The Asia Galleries include Harrison Rotunda which measures ninety feet across and ninety feet from the floor. Since its completion in 1915, this gallery has showcased the Chinese collection. Other rare Chinese works of art on display are two of the
six horse panels from
Emperor Taizong's Mausoleum in Shaanxi Province. Each of these horses had names and poems commemorating their service in the fight to unify China during the
Tang dynasty. The secular focus and historic realism of these reliefs marked a new direction in Chinese art. Four of the panels are at the
Beilin Museum in Xi'an, while the only two to have left China were donated to the Penn Museum by
Eldridge R. Johnson, the founder of the
Victor Talking Machine Company. Johnson also donated the perfectly spherical
crystal ball that sits in the center of the gallery. Along with an Egyptian statue of
Osiris, the Chinese crystal ball was stolen in 1988. Shortly afterwards, a student found its elegant silver stand, a stylized ocean wave, in a culvert not far from the museum. The items were recovered in 1991 after a museum volunteer saw the statue in an antique shop across the Schuylkill River in New Jersey. The FBI then traced the crystal ball to a home in New Jersey and returned it to the museum without a clue that would reveal who the original thieves were or how they committed the crime. The museum acquired the collection from the
Academy of Natural Sciences in 1966. Despite this, the museum claims the collection is an important historic and research resource. The museum has actively conducted research using the collection in recent years. More than a dozen crania, along with mid-19th century measuring devices, were on public display at the museum from 2012 to 2013 in an exhibit named "Year of Proof: Making and Unmaking Race". into storage after criticism from students and the local community.
MOVE Bombing Victim Remains In April 2021, following critical news coverage, the Penn Museum and the
University of Pennsylvania apologized to the Africa family and the community in general for allowing human remains from the
1985 MOVE bombing to be used in research and training. In 1986, an official from the Philadelphia City Medical Examiner's Office gave burned human remains found at the MOVE house to the museum for verification that the bones were those of 14 year old Katricia Dotson (a.k.a. Katricia or Tree Africa) and 12 year old Delisha Orr (a.k.a. Delisha Africa), although after the death certificates for both of those children were written, and after Dotson's family believed they were given Dotson's remains for burial in 1985. These remains were kept in a cardboard box in storage for decades and used for teaching by Alan Mann, a professor at Penn, and
Janet Monge, Mann's graduate student and later curator of physical anthropology at the Penn Museum. Without the family's permission, in 2019 the bones were used as a case study in an online forensic course by Janet Monge. They were also used as the subject of a Penn senior thesis in anthropology which Monge supervised. Although the bones used by Monge in the online case study were given to MOVE members in 2021, accounts differ regarding how many remains were at the Penn Museum and whether all bones which were given to Mann and Monge in 1986 were returned in 2021. A legal team hired by the University of Pennsylvania stated that the bones of Delisha Orr were never at the Penn Museum. However, an investigation by the City of Philadelphia disagreed, and stated that there was evidence that remains of Delisha Orr were at the Penn Museum. Nine forensic anthropologists certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology disagreed with the claims published by Penn's legal team and agreed with those of the City of Philadelphia. The City of Philadelphia also questioned whether all the remains of Katricia Dotson which were at the Penn Museum were given to MOVE in 2021. ==See also==