The research environment of the University of Pennsylvania and the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology consists of many layers of resources. On the broader scale there are the resources of the Eastern United States. The city of Philadelphia is ideally situated at the nexus of major east coast cities. Located between the capital, Washington, D.C., and New York City, students at the University of Pennsylvania have easy access to the wealth of resources this larger area provides. Closer by there are the tremendous resources of the city of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum. To get an initial taste for the city of Philadelphia we suggest you start with the visitor website provided by the city.

For a general introduction to the history and current diversity of the University of Pennsylvania there are a number of websites you could check out. A great place to start is the "about Penn" site. This site contains among other things information on the history of Penn, an intro to the various schools on campus, and a virtual tour of the Penn campus. If you take the virtual tour of the University of Pennsylvania you will sooner or later come across the University Museum building in the southeast corner of the University campus.

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology houses large archaeological and anthropological collections from all over the world. A large, in fact, the largest portion of the collections are from the Americas. In addittion the buildings house the department of anthropology and a state of the art research library. Below you will find much more information on the Museum as well as some documents with information both on the North American collections in the Museum and an article on NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) and the Museum.

University of Pennsylvania Museum (UPM)

The Museum contains over 1 million objects worldwide of anthropological interest with approximately 40,000 ethnographic materials, 150,000 archaeological materials, and 1500 Native American skeletal collections derived from a variety of contexts in North America. The vast bulk of these objects were collected between 1880 and 1940. Over the past 10 years large institutional support was directed to the compilation of lists of those materials for distribution to Native American groups as part of federal regulations detailed by the passage of NAGPRA in 1990. In spite of this commitment on the part of the Museum, it has been nearly impossible to fully research each of the collections except to the expressed end to determine as closely as possible (or if possible) cultural affiliation of these materials.

The University of Pennsylvania Museum is a fully integrated part of the University of Pennsylvania and is positioned directly under the umbrella of the Office of the Provost as an entity distinct from each of the established colleges and professional schools. Academic personnel (Curators) are shared between the academic departments of Penn, including Anthropology, Art History, Classical Studies and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and the Museum. In addition to these positions, the Museum employs approximately 100 staff members including research scientists/scholars with adjunct or lecturer status at the University level. There is no real academically-based functional division between the Museum and the University with undergraduate and graduate students moving freely within the Museum.

The Museum collections are divided into geographic regions including the following sections: American, Oceanian, Mediterranean, African, European, Near Eastern, Babylonian, and Asian. The skeletal materials are held independently from the geographic sections of the museum as part of the Physical Anthropology Section and there is a Section devoted to the study of Historical Archaeology. Each section has a curatorial head, who also holds a faculty position at Penn. The Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs, Dr. Harold Dibble (Senior Personnel), oversees the functioning and integration of each Museum section, while the Director is a tenured member of the Department of Anthropology.

The focus of this proposal concentrates on collections from the American Section (included as Senior Personnel and project directors are Dr. Robert Preucel, Dr. Clark Erickson, Dr. Marilyn Norcini, Lucy Fowler Williams [Keeper of the American Section], Stacey Espanlaub [NAGPRA Coordinator], William Wierzbowski [Assistant Keeper, American Section] and secondarily from the Physical Anthropology Section [co-PI and project manager, Dr. Janet Monge and Dr. Morrie Kricun, Adjunct Professor of Anthropology]). The projects outlined below rely heavily on other research personnel within the institution as project managers including Drs. Harold Dibble and Deborah Olszewski, as well as the Scientific Director of the Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology (MASCA), Dr. Stuart Fleming. Each of these individuals consistently oversees and conducts research with both undergraduate and graduate students.

The University of Pennsylvania is a large research university located within urban Philadelphia with approximately 8,000 undergraduate students. One of the primary goals of the University, especially in recent years, is to establish a strong undergraduate research component in the curriculum of each academic department and interdisciplinary center. The Department of Anthropology can boast that between 30 to 50% of its undergraduate majors now engage in independent research using primarily the capstone senior thesis as the end product of this work. Drs. Erickson and Monge, Chairpersons of Undergraduate Studies in Anthropology, oversee the mentoring of students by individual faculty members; there are approximately between 35 and 45 senior majors each year within the Anthropology Department program. Many of these students, especially those whose primary interests are in the area of Physical Anthropology or within the study areas encompassed by the American Section, use collections housed and curated at the Museum as part of their research projects. In addition, many undergraduates are actively employed in the Museum primarily but not exclusively as part of the federally supported Work Study Program.

Penn and the Museum have also served the greater community of the southeastern part of the Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware by serving as a research hub for undergraduates whose home organization contains no anthropological collections. Over the past 5 years, the Museum has hosted 19 undergraduate research projects undertaken by students from Bryn Mawr College, Haverford College, Widener University, West Chester University, Rowan University, Drew University and Arcadia University (formerly Beaver College)

North American Collections info: click here

(excerpt from Guide to the North American Ethnographic Collections, available for purchase through University Museum Publications)

NAGPRA and the Museum: click here

Out of Heaviness, Enlightenment: NAGPRA and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.