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On September 6, 1928, the Museum of Northern Arizona (MNA) first opened its doors to the public at the new Woman's Club building in the heart of Flagstaff, Arizona. The first lecture was given by Byron Cummings, the director of the Arizona State Museum (ASM) at the University of Arizona, about his recent excavations at die site of Turkey Hill Pueblo. Knowing why Cummings was asked, and why Turkey Hill Pueblo was the subject of his talk, can help us to understand die significance of the unique historical "moment" when die museum was founded, and why that should still be of interest to us today. At die 2008 Pecos Conference, celebrating eighty years of the museum and one hundred years of the Coconino National Forest (CNF) and of the Fort Valley Experiment Station, the organizing committee presented a plenary session with die tiieme of cooperation and collaboration among local Flagstaff institutions, including also Nortiiern Arizona University (NAU) and the National Park Service (which is still celebrating die hundred-plus years of the first Federal Antiquities Act, of 1906). Accordingly, Robert Breunig, die current director of MNA, suggested to me the same theme for a "Cummings Memorial Lecture." As it happens, I have studied Cummings' career (Wilcox 1988, 1993, 2005b; Wilcox and Fowler 2002; see also Bostwick 2006), as well as the history of MNA,1 and so was prepared to talk about die historical processes that defined the moment which die first board of the museum so presciendy seized, and die importance of cooperation and collaboration both then and subsequently in the growth of the museum. That moment was not simply a matter of serendipity produced by purest chance, but was what the French historian Fernand Braudel (1980) called a "conjunction," when a set of different historical processes came into alignment.
This essay is an outgrowth ofthat talk. My purpose is not to present a full history of MNA, but to touch on certain points that provide insight into whence we have come and to what the successes of die museum over the last eighty years can principally be attributed, as a guide to our future. I show that by exercising human agency, by forging "strategic alliances" among a certain set of people and institutions, the...