Harvard’s Peabody Museum fetes 150 years with unusual exhibit
For every remarkable object displayed in the new exhibition celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, visitors might be just as impressed by some other object they can’t so readily see. There are more than 1.25 million items in the Peabody collections, only a choice sampling of which could fit into the display cases for the exhibition “All the World Is Here: Harvard’s Peabody Museum and the Invention of American Anthropology,” which opened in April. Alluring in another way, though, is the critical role the museum played in birthing a new social science. A sledge that Adm. Robert Peary used on his 1891-92 exploration of Greenland is located on the fourth-floor gallery. Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer “In the second half of the 19th century, Putman was a key figure in starting to codify theories and information about human prehistory. Then new technologies came along that enabled us to...