Ten Great Science Museums: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology

I was in Guatemala on assignment a few years ago when a piece of my schedule came unglued, giving me four extra days to spend there. I used the time to go to Tikal to see the Mayan ruins excavated by archeologists from the University of Pennsylvania. The guide I hired, whose face was a copy of those on the Mayan stelae, knew about the University of Pennsylvania. It was in Philadelphia, USA, he told me, and he wondered what the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology there was like. It is very beautiful, I told him. I used to live nearby and visited it many years ago. I tried, in the combination of Spanish and English we were using, to tell him what I remembered: the pearly natural light in the building, the intimacy of the display areas, the human scale of the museum, all of which combined to let a visitor feel a direct, comfortable connection with the makers of objects hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years old. I told him the building had been designed by a famous architect and was a work of art in itself. He nodded, pleased.