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ABSTRACT This article explores the intersection of the career of Frederic Ward Putnam with the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard to the history of U.S. archaeology between his appointment as professor in 1866 and his death in 1915. Putnam was also active in institutional developments at Chicago, Berkeley, and New York. [Keywords: Frederic Ward Putnam, U.S. archaeology, Peabody Museum]
THE PEABODY MUSEUM of Harvard University has played a crucial role in the evolution of U.S. anthropology for sevenscore years, and the individuals at the museum who were involved in the early development of this trajectory have had a major impact on the current organization of our discipline. The events there are of particular importance in understanding the origins of our discipline because during the late 19th century there were four attempts to develop academic anthropology at universities in the United States; three of them were false starts (Chicago, Clark, and Pennsylvania), with the only successful, continuous program being the one instituted at Harvard (Darnell 1998: 106-110).
A large part of this success I believe was due to the leadership of Frederic Ward Putnam. And Putnam's contributions were more than just his 400 publications, his development of methodology, and his establishment of anthropology at Harvard. For example, he was also a cofounder of the journal American Naturalist and had a critical role in the early development of the journal Science. He was instrumental in helping to found the anthropology programs at the American Museum of Natural History, Columbia University, and the University of California-Berkeley and also played a lesser role in establishing anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago. And, furthermore, he was involved in the founding of the Archaeological Institute of America and the American Anthropological Association.
The importance of Putnam was more appreciated in that period than it is now a century later. Franz Boas refers to there having been but three great American anthropologists in the late 19th century: Daniel Garrison Brinton, John Wesley Powell, and Putnam. Giving testimonial to the contributions of Putnam, Boas further notes,
We owe to you the development of steady, painstaking methods of field research and of care in the accumulation of data; not detached from the ends sought by Powell, not without...