PEABODY REORGANIZES FACILITIES TO MAKE ROOM FOR VARIED NEW DISPLAYS

Plans to broaden the functions of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology were announced today.

The program calls for rearrangement and new display of the Museum's great collections of archaeology, ethnology, and physical anthropology which illustrate the development of man and his institutions in all parts of the world. The reinstallation will begin with the extensive collections relating to the American Indian.

Guide Service

New facilities for the public will include experiments in providing guide service for school children, with guides drawn from members of the staff, who will be available by appointment to conduct school classes and groups of ten or over through the Museum. In the second half-year it is planned to hold a series of free, public lectures on new research and expeditions of the Museum.

Eventually one of the exhibit halls on the ground floor of the Museum will be remodeled to provide space for special exhibits. In the meantime small exhibits are to be arranged in the front entrance hall. The next one opens before Thanksgiving and will deal with the origins and spread of Indian corn and its effect on the life of the peoples of the American before the coming of the Whites.

In charge of the new program is Frederick R. Pleasant, of the Museum staff.

This is the 75th year of the Peabody Museum, which was established in 1866, one of the first anthropological museums in America. Since its founding the Museum has sent out or participated in nearly 500 expeditions and field researches in every part of the world. Its best known collections present the artistic and industrial achievements of the Americas but the primitive people of Asia, the Pacific islands and of Africa are comprehensively represented.

Through a carefully worked out cataloguing system only recently completed, all the collections, numbering well into the hundreds of thousands, have been made uniquely valuable to those engaged in research.