Peabody Museum: Lures for Laymen, Nerve-Centre for the Anthropologist

For the ancients, legendary Valhalla lay somewhere in the great beyond; but for one group of scholars, at least--the University's anthropologists--Valhalla might more appropriately lie right here in Cambridge, inside the walls of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

Located on distant Divinity Avenue, close to several of Harvard's other great museums, Peabody may seem a remote outpost of the University. To the visitors who venture behind it drab red-brick exterior, however, the Museum offers an abundance of unusual exhibits. Seemingly endless display halls, spread over five floors, testify to the size of Peabody's world-wide anthropological collections. In fact, to discover all the Museum's displays is a feat of exploration in itself.

For the layman in the field, many of the Museum's exhibits verge upon the spectacular. Twenty-five foot totem poles dwarf the onlooker in the hall of Indian ethnology; in the Bowditch Hall of Middle American culture, huge casts of Mayan, statuary tower two floors in height. On Peabody's top floor, the skull of Mt. Carmel Man, the only Paleolithic man on exhibit in the United States, sits staring moodily at his bones in case across the hall. Not far away stands the Museum's ample collection of shrunken and mummified human beads, calculated to surprise even the most hardened curiosity-seeker.

Both the Peabody Museum is more than a mere repository for everything from African fertility symbols to embalmed chimpanzees. The display cases which line its walls are only the outward aspect of the Museum's role in the University and in the study of anthropology. The Museum is far loss purely antiquarian and far more complex than it-may appear to most of its casual Sunday visitors. Like the figurative iceberg, mot of Peabody lies below the surface.

Yale Grad's Idea

The original expectations of Peabody's founders have long since been exceeded; they appear modest purposes indeed, set against the multifarious activities of the Museum today. Curiously enough he initial idea for the foundation of the institution, one of the first of its kind in America came in 1805 from a Yale graduate, Othniel Charles Marsh. The science of anthropology was then in its relative infancy and Marsh, later to become America's first professor of paleontology, was little more than a novice in the field. But while digging one day in an ancient Indian mound in Ohio, Marsh was struck by the realization that the rapid settlement of the American countryside was resulting in the destruction of many of the relics of the ancient Indian tribes. As the young science of anthropology increased in prominence, much of the material for anthropological study seemed actually in danger of disappearing.

That night Marsh wrote to his uncle, George Peabody, a leading Boston financier, urging him to establish a museum. The chief object of the proposed institution was to be the collection of such ancient Indian remains as could still be obtained in America. Peabody had already expressed his intention of making a large gift to Harvard, and quickly approved Marsh's plan for the creation of general museum of archaeology and ethnology. Peabody's original gift, for the establishment of the Museum, made in 1866, was in three parts; a grant of $60,000 for a building, $45,000 for the purchasing needs of the institution, and a $45,000 endowment for the Peabody Professorship of Archaeology and Ethnology, a post now held by John Otis Brew, Director of the Museum and newly elected President of the American Anthropological Association.

World-Wide Importance

In the first few years of its history, the Museum's small collections were housed in an anatomical laboratory in Boylston Hall. Then, for a time, they occupied a gallery in the old anatomical Museum. In 1876, construction finally began on the present building, and the collections were moved there two years later. Almost immediately after its foundation, the Museum began to acquire archaeological specimens from sites abroad. Any idea of restricting the Museum's functions merely to the preservation of American collections was soon abandoned. As the twentieth century dawned, anthropology as a field of study began to grow enormously. And the Peabody Museum grew with it into an anthropological center of world-wide importance.

Peabody today is dedicated to the furtherance of all the many aspects of anthropological research and scholarship. The activities of the University's Department of Anthropology, of course, centre about the Museum--it is an invaluable aid both to teaching and to student research. In fact, most of the Department's faculty members perform a dual function--they hold appointments as curators of the various departments of the Museum as well as professorships of anthropology. The Museum itself, at present, has three endowed professorial chairs.

Primarily for Study

As director Brew points out, the Museum's collections and exhibits must be prepared primarily for the use of the student of anthropology and the scholar engaged in serious research. In this sense, the Museum's role as a showplace for the general public is distinctly secondary one. As a centre for teaching and scholarship, Peabody's first obligation must always be to the University.

Many of Peabody's exhibits are therefore of a sufficiently high technical nature to warm the heart of the most demanding practicing anthropologist. One of the Museum's prize displays, for instance, is its room devoted entirely ot sequences of prehistoric artifacts--row on row of stone implements, demonstrating Stone Age man's first feeble attempts at tool-making. In the so-called "bone laboratory," some 15,000 human skeletal remains repose in carefully classified cases for the edification of the Univeristy's physical anthropologists. The physical anthropology section of the Museum has the distinction of possessing the largest collection of chimpanzee skulls on the North American continent--over 300 skulls, several years. Another Museum collection, considerably less accessible to the general public consists of some 60,000 Army photographs illustrating types of body structure.

Constant Exchanges

Peabody's research activities are not confined to the Museum building proper, however. The Museum engages in extensive projects in coopreation with similar institutions all over the world. A constant exchange of specimens and inter-library leans take place between Peabody and organizations abroad. In particular, the Museum library, with well over 60,000 items, conducts a widespread exchange of research material with other museums and university departments of anthropology--Peabody publications even breach the Iron Curtain.

Perhaps the most noteworthy of Peabody's functions is its sponsorship of anthropological field expeditions. Director Brew estimates that the Museum has participated in between 600 and 700 such expeditions in the course of its 87-year history. Peabody expeditions are financed largely independently of the Museum's regular University budget--foundations usually provide part of the support but much of the financial backing is based upon outside grants from interested private citizens.

"And an Anthropologist"

Peabdoy expeditions often are pioneering anthropological projects, branching into relatively undeveloped areas of study. According to a common anecdote, probably as old as the Piltdown Man and just about as authentic, every Navaho family consists of a father, a mother, two children, and an anthropologist. Peabody has done it share in the past to develop such familiar channels of research, but pr recent years, Museum expeditions have tended to enter virgin anthropological territory.

One of the Museum's most intensive recent projects has been its large-scale expedition to Southwest Africa, a trip which produced the first complete cultural study of the African Bushman. For the first time, an anthropological group entered the wild Bushman country and actually lived with a native tribe. Led by Lawrence Marshall, a native of Cambridge though not a member of the University faculty, the expedition during its last season spent no less than 14 continuous months in contact with a 500-member Bushman tribe.

The Bushmen

The Marshall Party made survey trips to the Bushman area for two years before embarking on a full-scale study. Then, in June, 1952, the expedition returned to Africa with plans to film an entire year in the life of the tribe. "The only previous contact with Bushmen had been around police posts," Marshall explains. "Most of the Bushmen we worked with had never even seen white people before." Even the elementary problem of communication proved a vexing one, for the expedition had extreme difficulty in obtaining native interpreters who were familiar with the Bushman tongue.

But the Bushmen were friendly and hospitable hosts for fourteen months. "We never even say a quarrel among them during the whole time we were there." Marshall recalls. "At the end they were very sorry to see us leave and we were sorry to go." Besides good-will, the expedition brought back 120 pounds of written notes and tens of thousands of photographs of the Bushman in his native habitat.

Farmers' Site

In another of Peabody's expeditions, made possible by a grant from the George Grant McCurdy Fund, Hailam L. Movius Jr., associate professor of anthropology, spent last summer excavating one of the most important archaeological sites in Europe--the Les Eyzies Paleolithic deposits in southwestern France. Even in civilized France, however, the anthropologist meets his vicissitudes. The site hardy family of Freshfarmers, and "It's the richest site I've ever seen," says Movius wistfully; "Someday I hope the Peabody Museum will buy it."

Official red taps also complicated the expedition's work. The site is a protected national monument and the French Government authorization was required to take the excavated materials out of France. In addition, the site is located only a few feet from a main highway and hordes on curious motorists soon descended on the area to direct the archaeologists, in their work.

Impressive Results

In spite of all obstacles, however, Les Eyzies yielded impressive results. In six weeks of digging. Movius and his assistants found more than ten thousand artifacts in a trench only a meter wide by 13 meters long. He has extensive plans for future work in the area-'I'd like to dig there for six or seven years," he says. Movius hopes ot establish an international summer project at the site for interested students form institutions all over the world. "It would be a place for people who want training in excavation techniques," he explains, 'I'd be glad to take them on.

To a Better Understanding

Again this year Museum expeditions will set out in search of new anthropological words to conquer. Present plans call for Peabody operations of one kind or another this year on all the continents except Australia. Some of these projects will undoubtedly be highly organized expeditions with full staffs, others the intensive researches of single scholars. But all will be helping to push forward the frontiers of anthropological knowledge. To this goal of a better Understanding of man and his ways, the anthropologist is dedicated, whether he works with pen or pick-axe.The Mount Carmel Skull.