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State Department awards Penn $2 million to preserve cultural heritage in northern Iraq
A brown brick building in the background with gravestones and bushes in the foreground.

The cemetery of the Church of St. Thomas (above) in Mosul, Iraq, was badly damaged by Islamic State militants. The new grant awarded to the University of Pennsylvania will go toward stabilization and conservation of such culturally important sites.

State Department awards Penn $2 million to preserve cultural heritage in northern Iraq

The two-phase, three-year project aims to revitalize the city and its culture.
Marking the winter solstice, from Neolithic times to today
A prehistoric city with homes, earthen mounds, and pathways

Archaeological evidence for solstice celebrations abounds in the ancient North American city of Cahokia, located in what is now Illinois. (Illustration: Steven Patricia/Art Institute of Chicago)

Marking the winter solstice, from Neolithic times to today

For millennia, people have marked the winter solstice with rituals and celebrations—and they continue to do so today. Penn Museum anthropologists Lucy Fowler Williams and Megan Kassabaum discuss both ancient and contemporary customs associated with attending to the shortest day of the year.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Digging for the life stories of long-forgotten slaves

Digging for the life stories of long-forgotten slaves

Penn researchers, including visiting student Adeyemi Oduwole, are analyzing mitochondrial DNA from bodies discovered in Charleston, S.C. All of the people found were of African ancestry, making the site the oldest known graveyard of enslaved Africans in the city. “Both of my parents grew up in Nigeria,” said Oduwole. “Those could be my ancestors down there.”

Why did humans lose their fur?

Why did humans lose their fur?

The Perelman School of Medicine’s Sarah Millar discussed human hair growth patterns. Millar said, of a recently discovered inhibitor protein, “Dkk2 is enough to prevent hair from growing but not to get rid of all control mechanisms. There’s a lot more to look at.”

Making campuses more inclusive of Native ideology
five-peope-at-a-table-in-a-panel-discussion

From left to right: Maggie McKinley, an assistant professor in Penn’s School of Law; Ben Ototivo, a staff clinician at Penn’s Counseling and Psychological Services; anthropologist Tiffany Cain, a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology and in the Latin American and Latino
Studies Program; Margaret Bruchac, an assistant professor of Anthropology and the coordinator of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Penn; and graduate student Li San Goh. 
 

Making campuses more inclusive of Native ideology

A recent panel considered how to transform the worldview on university campuses to be more inclusive of Native ideology and more intentional about indigenization.
The Healing Word
Deborah Thomas in front of bookcase

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The Healing Word

Deborah Thomas embeds herself in communities stricken by violence to chronicle the humanity revealed during the aftermath.

Blake Cole

Unlocking the mystery of a 2,000-year-old child mummy

Unlocking the mystery of a 2,000-year-old child mummy

The Penn Museum, in collaboration with CHOP, conducted a CT scan on an Egyptian child mummy with hopes of learning more about the ancient remains. “She looks like she's the size of a 2-year-old, but her skeletal development, the growth of her teeth and bones, is more like a 5-year-old,” the Museum’s Samantha Cox said. “Maybe a type of dwarfism.”

A new take on the 19th-century skull collection of Samuel Morton

A new take on the 19th-century skull collection of Samuel Morton

After unearthing and analyzing handwritten documentation from scientist Samuel Morton, doctoral candidate Paul Wolff Mitchell drew a new conclusion about the infamous 19th-century collection: Though Morton accurately measured the brain size of hundreds of human skulls, racist bias still plagued his science.

Michele W. Berger