then experiencing institutional growth in the postwar expansion of anthropology.

Although begun as a challenge on the doorstep of North America’s most influential anti-Darwinian scientist, Peabody’s archaeology was remarkably free from overt evolutionary theory. Instead, the museum explored continuity between archaeological and contemporary cultures in Central America and the Southwest. This research thus exemplified the contradictions in the culture-historical approach that Bruce Trigger has identified in A History of Archaeological Thought (1978). A historian of archaeology, Trigger points to the influence on American archaeology of anthropologist Frans Boas’s resistance to evolutionary anthropology, conjoined with an increasing awareness of the particularity of local archaeological remains, in fostering a preoccupation with classification, definition of culture areas, and construction of chronologies. As in U.S. archaeology generally, when the Peabody’s archaeology grew to cover a global reach, the collation of culture-historical sequences substituted for an analysis of change.

A similar critique had been made from within Harvard by walter w. taylor, whose dissertation was based on Peabody-sponsored fieldwork in northern Mexico in 1938 and 1939, in A Study of Archaeology published in 1948. Trigger argues that Taylor was one of several scholars to move at about the same time toward being more concerned with functional and behavioral questions. Such questions were part of a general trend in U.S. archaeology toward a renewed concern with process and with cultural evolution that gained support in the 1950s and became widespread in the 1960s. In the development of what came to be called “new archaeology,” the formerly dominant voice of the Peabody was remarkably quiet. Like other anthropology departments with institutional roots in museums, Harvard persevered in its established practice of investigating the spatial and chronological extent of archaeological cultures. The carefully amassed collections, representative of different culture areas from around the world that formed the core of the museum, were installed for the benefit of advanced students in world prehistory. They were not suitable for the concerns of the systemic and functional studies launched under the new banner and awaited a new generation of archaeologists concerned with issues, such as materials sourcing and symbolic analysis, that could be addressed with individual objects.

Rosemary Joyce

See also

Maya Civilization; United States of America, Prehistoric Archaeology

References

Primary Sources

The object collections of the Peabody Museum, including over 2 million (estimated) archaeological items, are accompanied in collections files by documentation of both the original acquisition and the later study of the collections. The object collections are complemented by a photographic collection of over half a million items. The Peabody Museum Archives include papers from a number of the central characters in the history of the museum and papers from various research expeditions sponsored by the museum. The archives also include all the records of the Maya program of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., which were turned over to the museum following the termination of the program. Other papers relating to the early history of the Peabody Museum, including the papers of Frederick Ward Putnam, are in the archives of Harvard University.

Secondary Sources

Brew, J. O. 1966. People and Projects of the Peabody Museum, 1866–1966. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum.

Brew, J. O., ed. 1968. One Hundred Years of Anthropology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hinsley, C. 1984. “Wanted: One Good Man to Discover Central American History.” Harvard Magazine 87, no. 2: 64A–64H.

———. 1985. “From Shell-heaps to Stelae: Early Anthropology at the Peabody Museum.” In Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, pp. 49–74. Vol. 3 of History of Anthropology. Ed. G. Stocking. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Wade, E., and L. S. McChesney. 1980. America’s Great Lost Expedition: The Thomas Keam Collection of Hopi Pottery from the Second Hemenway Expedition, 1890–1894. Phoenix: Heard Museum.