Curtis Hinsley (1985) argues that the museum began as a platform at Harvard University for Darwinian evolution, a concept that was resolutely resisted by Louis Agassiz of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. When Agassiz refused an endowment from the business-man George Peabody, O. C. Marsh, Peabody’s nephew, persuaded Peabody to support the founding of a new museum for the study of American archaeology and ethnology. From 1866 to 1887, the Peabody Museum occupied an uneasy position vis-à-vis its institutional host. Although it was affiliated with Harvard, it was neither a teaching body nor fully incorporated into the university. It suffered from the lack of a disciplinary base within the university—or even in the United States in the days before academic archaeology developed. Hinsley notes that Jeffries Wyman, the first curator of the museum, refused an appointment to the professorship funded by the original endowment, an act that delayed the museum’s development of a teaching presence in a community defined by teaching.

One of the major factors in the movement of the museum toward greater integration, and hence status, within the university was the appointment in 1874 of frederic ward putnam as curator, the chief executive position in the museum. A former student of Agassiz who had split with his professor over the theory of evolution, Putnam overcame the resistance of Agassiz’s supporters and became the first Peabody Professor of American Archaeology and Ethnology in 1887. His appointment made it possible to teach archaeology, and supervise graduate students, just as financial support for the museum was growing.

During its early years, the Peabody’s trustees represented the social and business circles of eastern Massachusetts but not the leaders of Boston society. Hinsley identifies the appointment of F. M. Weld, a prominent Bostonian, to head the first visiting committee for the museum in 1889 as a turning point in drawing support from the more influential members of the community. Among the new patrons was Charles Pickering Bowditch, who encouraged and financially supported programs of research on Central America. In 1896, the legislature of Massachusetts approved the transfer of the assets of the Peabody Museum to Harvard and thus the museum became fully integrated into the university.

The Peabody’s archaeological research programs responded to changes through time in the museum’s academic staffing and support from the community and the growth it fostered in the discipline of archaeology. Under its first curator, research was restricted to the eastern United States and relied on independent research affiliates with no formal ties to the museum and variable training. Putnam ushered in a period of extension of fieldwork efforts. Still, the staff of the museum was limited, and much of the fieldwork was carried out by affiliates. With Putnam’s appointment to teach in 1887, greater control over training became a possibility, and during the remainder of Putnam’s tenure as curator, students gradually displaced affiliated researchers as the supervisors of the Peabody’s archaeological work.

On its fiftieth anniversary in 1917, the Peabody was poised to dominate archaeology in the United States. It had in place a full complement of specialists in world prehistory and a corresponding presence in field archaeology throughout the world. As the earliest degree-granting institution in U.S. archaeology, the museum spread its methodological approaches and theoretical orientations to other institutions staffed by Harvard graduates. The change in the title of the chief officer of the museum from curator to director in 1913, which J. O. Brew (1966) notes, coincided with the construction of a new building and paralleled the growth in the roster of curators who came to spearhead the teaching and fieldwork of the museum. Putnam’s successors had less influence over the direction of the museum’s research, which was now controlled by the professional staff. These specialists pursued largely independent concerns dictated by the different emphases in their own subfields. As a result, the Peabody Museum became an increasingly global institution whose research efforts were only loosely linked together by the dominant approach that has come, in retrospect, to be called culture history.

Jeffries Wyman had, through the sponsorship of research affiliates, involved the Peabody as a