Public Programs @ The Institute
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
The Monuments of Native North America: Deep Time through Today
Monday, November 2, 2026, 6:00pm
Speaker:Megan Kassabaum, Weingarten Associate Curator for North America, Penn Museum
While the general public often focuses on the archaeology of faraway places, North America's Mississippi River Valley is one of the richest archaeological regions in the world. Home to thousands of earthen mounds, it contains both the oldest and the most elaborate monumental architecture in North America. Based on nearly twenty seasons of fieldwork conducted on mound sites across the Eastern United States, this lecture explores the 5,000-year-long history of moundbuilding from the earliest sites built by mobile hunter-gatherers to Cahokia, the first city in North America built about 1000 years ago. Bringing it up to the present, this lecture also discusses ongoing indigenous stewardship of these monumental spaces.
Dr. Megan Kassabaum is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Penn and the Weingarten Associate Curator of the American Section at the Penn Museum. She recently curated the Penn Museum's new Native North American Gallery with eight indigenous co-curators. Her research focuses on precontact Native American archaeology of the American Southeast, monument construction and communal ritual, food and feasting, and ceramic technology. Recently, she has also been running a community archaeology project in West Philadelphia focused on more recent African-American history.
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