participant in the intense controversy surrounding the identity of the builders of earthen mounds throughout the Ohio River Valley and southeastern United States. When Putnam assumed the direction of the museum, he worked on mound sites in the eastern United States and encouraged affiliated researchers to investigate the same field. Putnam was conscious of setting standards for a new generation of archaeologists in his approach to field excavation and documentation. He was also deeply involved in the search for evidence for the early peopling of the Americas, in effect, trying to develop a long prehistory like the European Paleolithic. From 1875 to 1913, the museum sponsored affiliated research directed toward this goal, which Hinsley notes was received poorly within the emerging archaeological profession.

Putnam also expanded the scope of the museum’s field research, with affiliates conducting excavations in the western United States, mexico, and Nicaragua. Although the use of affiliated researchers allowed the museum to expand the sphere of its activities, these independent explorers were not trained in Putnam’s methods, and their availability was usually a chance offshoot of other activities. Development of the museum’s own research program lagged until the establishment of an academic department with Putnam’s professorial appointment in 1887. The financial support Charles Bowditch offered at the same time determined that the archaeology of the Maya would be an early focus of the program.

At first, the financial resources supported affiliated researchers, beginning with Edward H. Thompson, who worked for the museum between 1888 and 1908, but by 1891, Putnam had a trained graduate student, John G. Owens, and sent him to head a project to investigate the site of Copan in Honduras. Owens’s death while at the site placed the project engineer, George Byron Gordon, in charge and delayed the full realization of the goal of having Harvard-trained researchers conduct Central American fieldwork. Still, the precedent had been established.

Curtis Hinsley (1984) has reviewed the long search for a student who could carry out the goals Bowditch and Putnam envisaged for the museum in the Maya area, a search that culminated in selection of Alfred M. Tozzer. After 1905, the Peabody’s exploration of the Maya area was taken over by a generation of students that included Tozzer, sylvanus g. morley, Herbert J. Spinden, and R. E. Merwin. The mandate they worked under was Bowditch’s desire to illuminate the writing and calendar systems of the ancient Maya, which led to an emphasis on the exploration of sites that yielded inscribed monuments.

Bowditch’s resources made the orderly development of a research program in Central America possible. The patronage of Mary Hemenway, although more limited, was of similar importance to the museum. A fellowship funded by Hemenway was added to the museum’s endowments in 1890, and according to Edwin Wade and Lea McChesney (1980), Hemenway’s interests included both living cultures and archaeological sites of the U.S. Southwest. After her death in 1894, a collection of archaeological and ethnographic Pueblo pottery purchased with her funding in 1892 was left to the museum, and parts of the collection were placed on exhibit and thus available for study by the first generation of Harvard students to specialize in the cultures of the Southwest. Among these was alfred v. kidder, who supervised the first Peabody field research on the Pueblos from 1908 to 1914. From 1914 through 1929, the Peabody maintained a presence in the Southwest with excavations directed by Kidder and the museum’s assistant director, S. J. Guernsey. Peabody’s archaeology in this area stressed continuity between past and present and contributed to the developing culture area and direct historic approaches of U.S. archaeology.

Although the Americas were both the original focus and the strength of the museum, the Peabody made its first foray outside the Americas in 1900, and new research efforts were launched by museum staff members between 1914 and 1916 in England, the Near East, and Egypt. J. O. Brew notes that World War I cut short the development of the Peabody’s presence in these areas, and when the research was renewed, it was in cooperation with the American School of Prehistoric Research (ASPR), which was founded in 1921.