Curator

Stephen L. Whittington

Ph.D., Penn State University, 1989
Mesoamerican archaeology and human osteology.

“My professional interest . . . is the use of anthropology museums to teach students and the public about both the field of anthropology and the amazing diversity of cultures today and in the past. I want to educate visitors, not just have them leave feeling that they have seen something pretty or exotic. I think it is important for visitors to museums to think about how collections are made and come to be in museums. The process of creating collections often involves loss of much information about objects. There are ways to reconstruct some of the lost information, if we take the right approach and stay open to possibilities.”