Museum Studies Blog at Tufts University

by columnist Madeline Karp

Sometimes I find it hard to muster up the enthusiasm to go to natural history museums. Don’t get me wrong – I love natural history museums, and couldn’t wait for the annual school field trip to the NY Museum of Natural History as a kid – but sometimes, they just feel a little old hat.

Yes, I like dinosaur bones as much as the next girl, but the idea of seeing them again can be slightly less than thrilling. Which is why I had put off going to the Penn Museum in Philadelphia for upwards of 6 months.

Until.

Back in December, my family tore an article out of the newspaper for me, detailing how the Penn Museum was celebrating its 150th anniversary, and would be hosting curator-led flashlight tours of the mummies exhibit to celebrate.

Mummies? In the dark?? SIGN ME UP.

I recruited my friend Kristen to hold my hand, in case the mummies got extra creepy at night.

We took the tour, sharing a flashlight and giggling nervously at the idea of seeing dried out dead people in a dark room. Despite the fact that the tour was crowded, and it was sometimes hard to hear the guide, we both came out having had a good experience.

– New Perspective
Like I said, sometimes I have a hard time getting enthusiastic about natural history. But having the same content presented a new way was beyond thrilling. With sight limited, my other four senses heightened, forcing me to experience the exhibit in a completely different way.
Bonus: Kristen had actually been to the exhibit in the dark before; as a freshman at Penn, she attended a social mixer in the museum’s mummy hall, complete with DJ, dance floor and anachronistic toga costumes. Suffice it to say, I was more than a little jealous.

– In His Shoes
I’m all about stepping into history. I find first person, immersive experiences to be extremely informative. So when we were left alone to explore, I rounded a corner and my light beam brushed a sarcophagus. I felt my heart flutter with excitement. “This is totally how Howard Carter felt when he found King Tut, you guys!!” I sang. (No, really. I sang it.) I’ve read his diaries. Now I feel like I’ve lived them, if only for a moment.

– Great Date
More than one couple there was on a date. It’s a totally controlled environment, but something about mummies in the dark is still a little scary. If you’re looking for a date that combines the class of a museum with the fun of a haunted house, look no further.

– Curator Approved
Since the museum curators led the tour, we got the real insider’s perspective. Curators have favorite objects, they know quirky historical details, and sometimes even have adventurous stories about how they procured the objects themselves.

I’m actually really excited to return to the Penn Museum to see the mummies again in the daytime. I’m hoping it will be less crowded and am curious to see how the exhibit may feel different in the light. Will I pick up new details, or will the exhibit revert from magical to mundane? Regardless, the Penn has accomplished something big: I’m totally pumped to go back to the natural history museum!

Have you ever taken a flashlight tour of a museum? What did you think of it? What other kinds of oddball tours could museums offer to freshen up permanent exhibits? Share your stories with me in the comments!

by columnist Madeline Karp

“Look at this!” my friend Kristen called me over to a case in the Ancient Greek wing of the Penn Museum. The case was right next to the bathrooms, small and probably often overlooked, except by those waiting for their friends to finish washing up.

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (or the Penn Museum for short) focuses on a wide variety of ancient cultures, ranging from China to Iran, the Americas to Greece and Rome. College students take anthro classes in the museum, and kids and families from all over Philadelphia are invited for programs like the 40 Winks with the Sphinx museum overnight, Chinese New Year celebrations, and instructional tribal drum circles.

Kristen and I had decided to go to the museum one cold December night to attend a flashlight tour of the mummies exhibit (more on this next week), and needed to kill time before our tour slot. So we made our way to Ancient Greece.

“What is it?” I asked, circling back to see the case.

“Dice made from bones,” she replied. “Dated centuries before Christ.”

We quietly stood side by side as I took a moment to look at the dice, and then read the label, like a good museum visitor.

“Kristen, do you know what this means?” I said after a minute.

“What?” she asked.

“Jesus played Yahtzee!!”

Thus ensued giggling that lasted for the rest of the museum trip. The very idea of such a serious historical figure doing something recreational was oddly amusing.

A quick Wikipedia romp later that night informed me that Jesus could not, in fact, have played Yahtzee with the Apostles. The game wasn’t invented until 1956. But given that there were dice as early as the sixth century BCE, it’s not completely unrealistic to suggest that maybe Jesus played a dice game or two in his day.

After the giggles receded, the incident actually got me thinking – how important is historical accuracy in situations like this? Can we let loose just a little? (This coming from a history major? Horrors, I know. But hear me out.)

A large number of people who come through history and archaeology museums are not going to remember the fine details of the narrative. No matter how many times I told visitors to the National Archives in Washington DC that the original Bill of Rights actually contains 12 amendments, they left the museum saying that the oversized page has only 10. No matter how many times I insist to my family that the Vikings didn’t have horns on their helmets…Vikings totally had horns on their helmets.

Sometimes tiny historical revisions are just more popular than the facts.

Suffice it to say, sometimes people put two and two together and get twenty-two. It’s not really right, but it’s not exactly wrong either.

So if this kind of revisionist logic rears its head – dice existed when Jesus did, Yahtzee is a game played with dice, therefore Jesus played Yahtzee – does it matter if that understanding is slightly wrong? I came out of my trip to the Penn Museum learning some things I never expected. I had no idea dice were so old. I had no idea Yahtzee was so new.

What started off as a punch line actually got me to look at objects in a new way. When we looked at cosmetic cases from Ancient Egypt, we wondered, “Did Cleopatra have a stylist?” When we saw ancient Roman coins we wondered, “Did Roman centurions hate it when their change jingled?” These thoughts are silly, yes, but are they totally unreasonable?

After the dice joke, long dead figures suddenly became way more human, and I was suddenly doing research on things like the history of eyeliner and coin purses and how people cut their nails before modern clippers were invented.

FYI – The first patent for a nail trimmer in the US dates to 1875, but it details an improvement to made existing clippers. So the implication is that they existed earlier than that.

What I want to know is this – at what point should we accuracy-obsessed history folk just shrug it off? It’s a losing battle to try and force people to remember every little detail about your favorite historical era. The average person probably does not care as much as I do that the General Lafayette was not a morning person. (One time, he slept through an early morning bread riot that was literally outside his Versailles window. True story.)

So if by using the “two and two” revisionist logic visitors do learn something, or get excited about history, or go home and research an object on their own – is it okay to let people assume that Jesus played Yahtzee? Can we have a sense of humor, and let some of the small stuff go? Personally, I think I could, if it meant people had fun in the museum and still understood the basic idea: Jesus and dice were contemporaries.

Could you let small revisions go? Or would you keep fighting for detailed historical accuracy at all costs? Let me know what you think in the comments!