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Michele W. Berger
Science News Officer
mwberger@upenn.edu
Anthropology
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
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.
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 embeds herself in communities stricken by violence to chronicle the humanity revealed during the aftermath.
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.
Invisible partners: Recovering relationships in early anthropological research
Margaret Bruchac, an assistant professor of anthropology, examines the social relationships between early 20th-century anthropological collectors and Indigenous collaborators.
Exploring the human propensity to cooperate
Working with a nomadic group in Tanzania, one of the last remaining nomadic hunter-gatherer populations, Penn psychologists show that cooperation is flexible, not fixed.
Collective grief over loss from Brazil’s National Museum fire
Members of the Penn Museum’s archeological community discuss the devastation felt over the destruction of an invaluable piece of world history.
Piecing together an ancient biblical site, bone by bone
In the lab of Penn Museum’s Janet Monge, rising senior Fiona Jensen-Hitch is sorting and photographing ancient human remains to shed light on the people of ancient city of Gibeon.
Philly as lab, classroom, and collaborator
Philadelphia’s rich history and forward momentum make it ripe for scientific inquiry for a number of Penn schools and departments, from urban and population studies to medicine and anthropology.
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In the News
National Geographic
There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label
Paul Wolff Mitchell of the School of Arts and Sciences, PIK Professor Sarah Tishkoff and Yana Kamberov of the Perelman School of Medicine discussed race and genetics. Skulls from Samuel Morton collection in the Penn Museum are also featured.
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Smithsonian Magazine
Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Barracoon’ Tells the Story of the Slave Trade’s Last Survivor
Deborah Thomas of the School of Arts and Sciences discussed novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s lesser-known work “debunking scientific racism” in the field of anthropology.
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