[1] During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, North American and European museums regularly sponsored such excavations throughout the Mediterranean and Near East, sharing the ownership of their discoveries with the host country.

The decision elicited local and world-wide criticism among concerned scholars, who felt that it departed from the Penn Museum's historic mission as a research institution.

The museum's director at the time, Dr. Richard Hodges later offered positions as "Associate Curators" or "Research Project Managers" to eleven of the eighteen individuals affected.

Features of the extant building include a dramatic rotunda, multiple courtyards and gardens, a fountain, reflecting pool, glass mosaics, iron gates, and stone statuary.

The Penn Museum was designed by a team of Philadelphia architects, all of whom taught on the faculty of the university: Wilson Eyre, Cope & Stewardson and Frank Miles Day.

This library also consists of a manuscript collection of nearly two hundred volumes relevant to the study of autochthonous Central American languages; most of which are either severely endangered or have completely disappeared.

[5] Prior to its move in 1971 the collection was built upon the support of museum curators contributing their personal monographs, negotiations with affiliate institutions here and abroad as well as endowments by philanthropic individuals.

Prior to her arrival use of the library had been limited to employees of the museum and university professor; however, Griffin extended the accessibility to include students.

As of 2023, there are eleven permanent galleries: Africa, Asia, Egypt, Sphinx, Middle East, Eastern Mediterranean, Etruscan, Greece, Rome, Native American Voices and Mexico and Central America.

Collection areas include Africa, America (North, Central and South), Asia, Egypt, Europe (Etruscan, Greece and Rome), Mediterranean, Near East and Oceania.

During a museum sponsored expedition in 1936–1937, Curator of General Ethnology, Henry Usher Hall spent seven months conducting ethnographic research among the Sherbro people of Sierra Leone.

The collection consists of textiles, sculpture, artifacts related to subsistence and household items, secret society and examples of medicine bundles.

Hall's papers include field notes, bibliographies, and textual commentaries that provide ethnographic information about the way of life of the Sherbro people and others—including the Mende, Krim, and Temne peoples—who lived among them.

Penn professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Dr. Tufuku Zuberi,[9] was appointed as the head curator for the new Africa exhibit,[10] and approached his former student Breanna Moore about designing a new dress for the gallery.

Moore enlisted the help of her friend and Philadelphia artist, Emerson Ruffin, to create the dress titled “Wearable Literature”,[11] now a popular item in the Penn Museum's African galleries.

The masquettes were unfortunately distorted upon removal from the water, but they and the numerous tools and practical items had an unusually high level of preservation due to their underwater location.

As a professor and chair of the anthropology department at the University of Pennsylvania, Frank Gouldsmith Speck was one of the most prolific donors to the museum's Sub-Arctic ethnology collections.

Penn Museum's Mesoamerican collections include objects from Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama and Costa Rica.

In Guatemala, Robert Burkitt acquired ethnographic ceramics, textiles, tools, hammocks, fans and gourds from the Alta Verapaz the early twentieth century.

[18] Tatiana Proskouriakoff excavated this object in Piedras Negras, and at the time of its discovery, archaeologists could not decipher the Mayan hieroglyphics engraved in it.

[19] The museum's South American collections are as varied as the regions from which they come – the arid coast of Peru, the Andean Highlands, and the tropical lowlands of the Amazon Basin.

The collections include anthropological materials from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela.

Smaller collections represent some of the indigenous peoples of Argentina (Yahgan), Chile (Alacaluf, Mapuche), Colombia (Arhuaco, Chocó, Goajira, and Kogi), and Ecuador (Jívaro, Tumaco, Saparo).

The FBI then traced the crystal ball to a home in New Jersey and returned it to the museum without a clue that would reveal who the original thieves were or how they committed the crime.

Most notably, the museum houses a set of architectural elements, including large columns and a 13-ton granite Sphinx of Ramesses II, circa 1200 B.C., from the palace of the Pharaoh Merenptah.

The collection contains the largest number of Sumerian school tablets and literary compositions of any of the world's museums, as well as important administrative archives ranging from 2900 to 500 BCE.

[22] Morton has long been criticized for promoting white supremacist views, leveraging science to uphold racism, poor research quality, and unethically collecting human remains without consent.

[36][37][38][39][40] More than a dozen crania, along with mid-19th century measuring devices, were on public display at the museum from 2012 to 2013 in an exhibit named "Year of Proof: Making and Unmaking Race".

[44] In April 2021, following critical news coverage, the Penn Museum and the University of Pennsylvania apologized to the Africa "family" and the community in general for allowing human remains from the 1985 MOVE bombing to be used in research and training.

[45] In 1986, an official from the Philadelphia City Medical Examiner's Office gave burned human remains found at the MOVE house to the museum for verification that the bones were those of 14 year old Katricia Dotson (a.k.a.