The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is dedicated to the study and understanding of human history and diversity. Founded in 1887, the museum has sent more than 400 archaeological and anthropological expeditions to all the inhabited continents of the world. The current building opened in 1899 and is an eclectic-style Romanesque structure. Several expansions have taken place over the years, the most recent in spring of 2002.
The museum was among the first American institutions to begin collecting African art and artifacts; most of the 15,000 objects in the collection were obtained between 1891 and 1937, with a large portion purchased in 1912 from art dealers in London and Hamburg. Many of its pieces were collected in the Congo by Leo Frobenius. Most of the Mesoamerican collection (28,000 pieces) was obtained through the museum’s field excavations at sites such as Piedras Negras and Tikal in Guatemala, Caracol in Belize, and Copan in Honduras, among others. The museum has been a leader in Mesoamerican research since the early 1900s.
In the 1890s, the museum began acquiring Southwest Native American collections. Today the collection contains some 3,000 ethnographic and 5,000 archaeological objects. Its Alaskan holdings, now approximately 10,000 ethnographic and archaeological objects, were acquired in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Oceanic Section houses over 20,000 objects from the major cultural regions of the Pacific Ocean as well as from Australia and Insular Southeast Asia. It includes objects acquired during the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842 (aka The Wilkes Expedition) as well as material from the English dealer W. O. Oldman. A fine early assemblage of material from New Guinea is a collection of about 840 objects acquired by “Captain H” on a trip up the Sepik River in 1913, one of the earliest from the region in any museum. In 2003 the museum acquired an important group of about 140 objects from the Melanesian islands of New Caledonia. Exhibited at l’Exposition Universelle et Internationale de 1900 in Paris, they then went to the Philadelphia Commercial Museum and from there to their present home.
The museum’s collection from Australia includes about 27,000 ethnographic and archaeological objects. Approximately 1,200 of these were among the first objects collected for the University Museum in the field by a trained anthropologist. Also in the museum’s founding collection is an assemblage of about 2,000 objects acquired in Sarawak and Dutch Borneo in 1896–1898, which ranks as one of the two most important Borneo collections in the United States.
Only a small percentage of the museum’s collection is on display. Additional pieces are displayed in traveling exhibitions and through loans. Stored objects are accessible to qualified researchers.