inception and at the end of the twentieth century is undertaking research in eighteen different countries around the world (Madeira 1964; Rainey 1992; Winegrad 1993).

Comparable in its history to other important university-based archaeology/anthropology museums in the United States, like Harvard University’s peabody museum of archaeology and ethnology, the UPM is unique with respect to the size of its staff, collections, research activities, public galleries, and outreach. Although smaller in size than the great natural history museums, such as the American Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of Natural History, and the Field Museum of Natural History, all of which have significant archaeology/anthropology departments, the UPM is closer in its scale of operation to such institutions than it is to its university-based peers.

During the course of its history, the UPM has sponsored research expeditions to all the inhabited continents and has participated in a number of famous projects that have played key roles in the history of world archaeology. Among the latter can be mentioned John Peters, Hermann Hilprecht, and John Haynes’s excavation of Nippur; max uhle’s early stratigraphic work at Pachacamac; harriet boyd hawes’s pioneering work on Crete; David Randall MacIver and sir leonard woolley’s excavations in nubia; Clarence Fisher’s excavations at various ancient Egyptian sites; Woolley’s renowned work in the royal cemeteries at ur, including the discovery of the famous tomb of Queen Pu-abi; the path-breaking biblical archaeological project at the site of Beth-Shean led by Fisher, Alan Rowe, and Gerald Fitzgerald; the pioneering Alaskan research at Cook Inlet by Frederica de Laguna; Erich Schmidt’s key work in iran; Edgar Howard’s landmark research in New Mexico; Rodney Young’s important study of the Phrygian capital of Gordion, turkey, including the discovery of the Midas Tomb, work on which continues a half-century later under the leadership of Kenneth Sams, Mary Voigt, and Elizabeth Simpson; Robert Dyson’s renowned excavations at Hasanlu; and Edwin Shook and William Coe’s trend-setting research at the ancient Maya city of tikal.

Not only have these and more recent projects had high public and professional visibility and made significant contributions to scholarly understanding of the ancient world, but in many cases they have also fostered methodological and technical advances in the field of archaeology, especially with regard to the productive use of new scientific techniques in the field and in the laboratory. For example, UPM projects in peru and what is now Israel helped introduce modern archaeological field techniques, including the use of stratigraphy, in those areas. The museum and its applied science center have also played key roles in the growth or further development of subsurface sensing, radiocarbon dating, thermoluminescence, analyzing trace residues in ceramics, and computerized survey tools. In addition, under the leadership of George Bass, the UPM helped launch a new subfield of the discipline: underwater, nautical, or maritime archaeology.

Museum-sponsored research also has led to radical alterations in archaeological approaches to particular civilizations or culture areas. One of the best examples of such an impact is the fourteen-year (1956–1970) UPM project at the ancient Maya site of Tikal in Guatemala. Research at the site paved the way for a complete rethinking of the traditional model of maya civilization. Tikal findings clearly indicated that the older view of a nonurban, peaceful society supported by a maize-based swidden agricultural system was simply not viable. The writings of the Tikal archaeologists rapidly led to the construction of a more complex and variegated model that was more comparable to other early civilizations in both the Old and the New Worlds than was the traditional one. Important research in Thailand, especially at the ban chiang site, initiated by Chester Gorman and now being shepherded to final publication by Joyce White, is another good example regarding the changed understanding of the culture-history of Southeast Asia, especially in relation to the spread of agriculture and the rise of complexity.

Beyond the contributions that the museum has made over many decades to substantive archaeological knowledge, it also has been an integral part of Philadelphia’s intellectual and social history in particular (Conn 1998; Kuklick