Penn Museum
Archaeology and anthropology museum where a nineteenth-century skull collection was finally laid to rest after two centuries in drawers.
This guide to the Penn Museum in Philadelphia follows a nineteenth century collection that sat in drawers for almost two hundred years. Samuel George Morton, a Philadelphia physician, spent the early 1800s measuring skulls with mustard seed and lead shot to rank human beings by race, amassing more than 1,300 crania before his death in 1851; the collection reached Penn in 1966 and was catalogued rather than mourned. You'll hear how a 2020 committee began combing almshouse and burial records to learn whose skulls these actually were, and what the museum decided to do once it found out. Stand near Harrison Garden to see how the story was finally marked.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.