Perhaps because of the financial support provided by Bowditch, the Peabody’s work in Central and South America was the first to fully integrate student training and research. The establishment in 1914, under Sylvanus Morley’s direction, of a program in Maya research by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. (CIW) provided opportunities for students trained by A. M. Tozzer to work in the Maya area but also effectively prevented the Peabody from continuing its own field research there. A precedent for work in lower Central America had been set by the museum’s sponsorship of work in Nicaragua in the 1870s and 1880s and non-Maya Honduras in the 1890s.

Between 1917 and 1929, Peabody researchers undertook exploratory trips to costa rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and areas of guatemala and mexico not directly under investigation by the CIW. As Hinsley notes, the Maya had given the museum a suitably civilized, and hence worthy, subject for research. The discovery of spectacular burials at the site of Sitio Conte in panama provided another object of study, a Central American civilization that boasted a rich tradition of gold working. Under Tozzer, the Peabody expanded its efforts in Central and South American prehistory, from non-Maya Honduras to the Andes, through work by students and curatorial associates, themselves usually ex-students. Tozzer’s central concern was to establish chronologies, exemplified in his own study of the site of chichén itzá employing stylistic seriation. His students sketched the outlines of culture-historical sequences for much of Central and South America.

Even without the strong presence that Tozzer had exercised and the patronage support that Bowditch had provided, the archaeology of Europe and Asia developed as a new strength of the Peabody after 1921. Brew credits the ASPR with revitalizing the Peabody’s interest in this field, noting that it provided field opportunities for students. Among them were the later principal investigators of Peabody-sponsored projects between 1929 and 1939 in southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and India. A stable institutional base for European archaeology within the museum was provided by curator Hugh O’Neill Hencken, who directed projects in Ireland and italy beginning in 1931.

The Peabody’s original interest in North American archaeology was also supported by new curatorial and professorial staff active in the 1930s and 1940s. J. O. Brew carried out research in the western United States beginning in 1931, especially in the Pueblo area, that served as a training ground for students. Philip Phillips institutionalized the museum’s involvement in the archaeology of the Southeast, establishing the Lower Mississippi Survey (LMS) in 1933. The LMS took a systematic regional approach to site location and the construction of culture history.

In 1937, students working in the western United States reopened for the Peabody the long dormant issue of the antiquity of human occupation of the Americas. Undoubtedly this development owed some of its inspiration to a new acceptance of the topic sparked by the early dating of the Folsom tradition in 1926, which made respectable the concerns that Hinsley notes had been an embarrassment for Putnam at the turn of the century. It also reflected the influence of a global approach in archaeological training at the Peabody. The Peabody’s specialist in Old World paleolithic archaeology, Hallam Movius, began his research on early sites for the museum in Burma and Java in 1937. Following World War II, he continued his research with investigation of Mousterian sites in Uzbekistan and of the Abri Pataud in france. Familiarity through his teaching with the outlines of the European and Asian record facilitated the approach by students of the prehistory of the Americas to what had long been an ignored issue.

The Peabody Museum, by providing training for a substantial proportion of the academic archaeologists working in North America before 1950, effectively acted as one of the forces providing coherence to the discipline. This coherence was given literal form with the publication in 1953 and 1955 of sections of what became gordon willey’s and Philip Phillip’s Method and Theory in American Archaeology (1958). The work of Tozzer’s successor in the Central American field and the Peabody’s curator for the southeastern United States, the book systematized the framework of North American archaeology,