Lainie Schultz

December 12, 2025

Archaeology with No Thumbs

Contributed by Lainie Schultz

Sometimes it’s hard to be an archaeologist. You tell people what you do and watch their excitement dim as you say “No. Not dinosaurs.” Sometimes people think you’re Indiana Jones, so that’s a little better, but then you have to explain that actually looting’s not ok, and maybe we should discuss the ethics of collecting? Plus, you’ve never once fought a Nazi. (You do, however, wear an awesome hat.)

Not an archaeologist. (Via ChatGPT. I didn’t even need to prompt the pyramid.)

Some would argue this is the greatest real-world problem archaeologists today face. Incredibly, hope for the field has finally arrived – and it’s all thanks to LEGO.

FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL) is a global program designed to encourage children in hands-on STEM learning. Among its major activities is the FIRST LEGO League Challenge, an annual competition for students aged 9-16 that has them working in teams to design, build, and code their own LEGO robot and complete a research-driven Innovation Project that identifies and solves a real-world problem related to a specific scientific theme. This year, the Challenge theme was UNEARTHED, inviting FLL teams to learn about the field of archaeology, identify a real-world problem faced by archaeologists, and propose an innovative solution.

Never have archaeologists been so popular! As soon as the Challenge kicked off, the Peabody began receiving requests from teams hoping to meet with an archaeologist and find out what challenges they’d want to see solved. And, of course, we weren’t remotely alone in this. I had a lot of fun this fall checking in with colleagues at other institutions, as we collectively realized how big the FLL Challenge is. The Society of American Archaeologists (SAA) even convened a panel of experts (including our own Ryan Wheeler!) for a webinar specifically designed for participants in the UNEARTHED season, just to help manage all the requests people were receiving. Exploring Archaeological Challenges: A Webinar for FIRST® LEGO® League and Robotics Teams was recorded and posted on the SAA’s YouTube channel, massively eclipsing in viewership all the channel’s other recordings combined.

We also heard from teams once they had their projects and were ready for feedback on the problems they’d selected and the solutions they’d proposed. Projects broadly sought either to help archaeologists do their jobs more easily with sustainable solutions, or to help non-archaeologists better understand the field and access archaeological information. Ideas included such products as a Swiss Army trowel, and an artifact cleaning and processing machine with residue-testing capabilities. They sought to help people grasp the size of ancient monuments through comparison with a football stadium for scale, and harnessed the sun to power absolutely anything you could imagine. They ranged in size, scope, and ambition, and all were far more sophisticated than I have represented here.

We might have initially been both a little concerned and a little amused when we first learned about this competition (an FLL reel Ryan found on Instagram had a lot more fire and explosions than we generally like to associate with archaeology!), but the projects that teams have come up with have truly been impressive. Most impressive of all has been the amount of thought and attention these young students have put into learning about the field of archaeology, and the care they have put into making it better for the future. I can only imagine what might be the long-term impacts of this program on the next generation of archaeologists.

Though perhaps their biggest problem will be convincing people that, no. Usually they do have thumbs.

August 25, 2025

Naturhistorisches Museum Wien

Contributed by Lainie Schultz

Emperor Franz I and his natural science advisors

This summer I went to visit a friend in Vienna. I hadn’t seen her in [*cough*] years, so my inspiration was mainly just to hang out with her. It was only after I had my plane tickets and the trip was drawing near that I actually started looking into what there was to do in Vienna.

Turns out, the Venus of Willendorf is there. For a museum nerd I don’t tend to visit that many museums when I travel, but the Venus of Willendorf is famous enough (there’s even a cast of the original here at the Peabody) and I am nerd enough for that to justify seeking her out. This meant dragging my friend to the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien.

If you had asked me beforehand what I expected of the place, I’m not sure what I would have said. I’m familiar enough with the broad-strokes histories of museums and their ties to imperialism: As nations started to push further and further out into the world during the Age of Exploration, voyagers brought back evidence of their encounters with new environments in new places, creating displays that combined minerals, plants, animals, and man-made “curiosities.” These collections offered opportunities for viewers to learn about the world, as centered by their home locations, but equally they offered opportunities for displayers to demonstrate their status and wealth, the power of their influence and access – not just how they saw the world but how they wanted others to see them in it. If you look for it, this history is written into the architecture and design of museums, and I have been academically trained to look for it. So maybe if you had asked me beforehand what I expected of the Naturhistorisches Museum I would have said “nothing new.”

Reader, I was wrong.

This place was every piece of museum history I had ever learned, jacked up on steroids. It was everything I had been taught to expect dialed up to a ten, with a little extra more thrown in just for fun. It was contemporary best practice crammed into 19th century display cases surrounded by imperial displays of awe and wonder, and I was there for every moment of it. Just please don’t ask me much about the exhibits themselves! I was far too distracted to notice.

Neither my photos nor even the museum’s does this place justice. Try exploring a bit more with some select collections, online exhibits, or a virtual tour.

March 20, 2025

The Making of a Student Exhibit

Contributed by Lainie Schultz

The Peabody Institute is currently host to the exhibit “Indigenous (Mis)representations on American Numismatic Objects,” displaying items from the History and Social Science department, the personal collections of Donny Slater, and the hard work of the students in his class HSS507: History in Your Pocket – American Stories, Ideals, and Economics as Told through Coins and Currency.

Combining historical investigation and close examination of the images depicted on American coins, bank notes, and tokens dating from 1744 to 2000, Donny’s students connected the use of Native American iconography on these objects of exchange to efforts to build a national identity that hid the violence of Westward Expansion at the country’s core, choosing this as the story they wanted to share with the Andover community. While the Peabody provided the class with the space and the display case, all the work of the design and installation came from the students themselves.

Everyone was deeply engaged in the process, and the results speak for themselves.

The exhibit will remain up through Alumni weekend, ending June 9, 2025.

Pre-installation day 1: finding the layout to match the narrative

Sharing with fellow-coin enthusiast Elena Dugan (PhilRel)

Student (Mis?)representations of Their Teacher Donny Slater

February 20, 2025February 20, 2025

Introducing: The Andover Anthropological Society

Contributed by Lainie Schultz

Among the newest student clubs on offer to the Phillips Academy community as of this term is the Andover Anthropological Society: a group of students of superior intelligence who recognized ahead of their peers that doing research with cultural materials is incredibly fun, and an excellent use of one’s free time.

Now with a membership of ten, club members selected as their inaugural project an accession of Arctic materials surface-collected by Patricia Hume near Utqiagvik (previously Barrow), Alaska during six summers between 1959-1969, and donated to the Peabody Institute in 1998. Meeting weekly at the Peabody, so far the AAS has received collections handling training and begun to build direct experience doing close-looking analysis of cultural materials; perused the Pat Hume accession file and visited storage, doing archival research AND learning some basics of museum practice (I’m very efficient); learned about the Bureau of American Ethnology and delved into 20^th century ethnographies from the region (thank you, OWHL reference librarians!); and started to explore various themes and approaches for their group project. These have included connecting collections to Iñupiaq language, exploring notions of gender and household structures, and questioning anthropological terms like “effigy” to build more robust interpretations of people’s material expressions of spirituality and religion – just to name a few.

AAS members closely examining “household” items from the Pat Hume accession and debating whether I was messing with them in my claims for what they were. [Not pictured: all the female members of the club. I promise it was just unlucky they had to leave before I could take any photos…]

Whichever direction(s) the club ends up taking, what they learn will enter into the Peabody’s database, enhancing our own understandings of these collections here and the ways in which we’ll be able to connect others to them in the future.

I happen to have the privilege of serving as faculty advisor for this club, and it has been a joy getting to know these students, and having them teach me about Iñupiat culture. Bookmark this blog and stay tuned to learn more about the AAS from the AAS itself!

December 18, 2024

She has a name, you know

Contributed by Lainie Schultz

Inclusive editing of catalog records is an important aspect of contemporary museum, library, and archival practice, or for any space maintaining a catalog of records for people to access and learn from. In particular where catalog records are themselves pieces of history, written at times when accepted language usage was different from what it is today, it can be necessary to return to the descriptions we rely on to access materials and rewrite them to remove what we now recognize as harmful language. In this way we can provide users with more accurate, respectful, and inclusive terminology, and disrupt the barriers created by prior language.

While incredibly vital work, accomplishing these changes can often be slow, at times requiring a thoughtful and collaborative approach to determine what language is correct in place of what was used previously; extensive research to fill missing gaps; and/or the development of new processes or procedures for altering records, to document these changes so that our history is not erased – and then, of course, actually editing these records, sometimes one by one. The satisfaction gained from the effort can be immense, but the gratification is often delayed.

And, also, sometimes it’s ridiculously easy.

One common omission in catalog records is the names of women, often found identified as the wives of their husbands. I recently encountered one such woman in the Peabody Institute’s catalog while researching a Tohono O’odham basket in our care, donated by Mrs. Edmund Hamann. Looking to gain a better understanding of the basket’s arrival at the Peabody, I turned to its accession record, where I found the following:

A letter much like the one previous to it in the file, directed to Mrs. Edmund Hamann, but here with a very different greeting: Dear Mary.

Such a simple discovery, but one that thrilled me no end. No longer does Mary have to live in our records as the wife of Edmund, and no longer do we need to refer to her only in relation to him. She gets to have her own name.

What an improvement!

October 14, 2024

This Day in History, 1911

Contributed by Lainie Schultz

The Society of American Indians, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, February 14, 1914. *The Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians, Volume 2, 1914.*

On the weekend before Columbus Day in Columbus, Ohio, 1911, a group of Native American leaders and activists joined together to attend what became the first annual meeting of the Society of American Indians, or SAI. For the next thirteen years, this pioneering Pan-Indian organization was a center for Native American political advocacy, lobbying Congress and the then-Office (now Bureau) of Indian Affairs; offering legal assistance to Native individuals and tribes; publishing a quarterly journal; and corresponding extensively with Native Americans, “Friends of the Indian” reformers, political allies, and critics across the country.

Members of the SAI were a veritable “who’s who” of early twentieth century Native history, representing activists, clergy, entertainers, professionals, speakers, and writers, from communities both on- and off-reservation. To namedrop just a few, these included (but were by no means limited to): attorney Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin (Métis/Turtle Mountain Chippewa/French); musician and writer Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Yankton Dakota); educator Henry Roe Cloud (Winnebago); Episcopal priest Sherman Coolidge (Arapaho); civil servant Charles Dagenett (Peoria); painter and illustrator Angel De Cora (Winnebago); Episcopal priest Philip Joseph Deloria (Yankton Dakota); physician Charles Eastman (Dakota); author and linguist Laura Cornelius Kellogg (Oneida); ethnologist Francis La Flesche (Omaha); physician Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai Apache); writer, editor, and journalist John M. Oskison (Cherokee); archaeologist Arthur C. Parker (Seneca); lawyer Thomas Sloan (Osage); and advocate Henry Standing Bear (Lakota).

Without sharing a singular vision of Native American identity, tribal self-determination, or what the place of Native Americans should be within US society, these individuals committed themselves to a shared purpose, striving firstly “To promote the good citizenship of the Indians of this country, to help in all progressive movements to this end, and to emulate the sturdy characteristics of the North American Indian, especially his honesty and patriotism.” Seeking to benefit the freedom and development of all Native Americans, the two primary platforms on which the SAI stood were U.S. birthright citizenship for Native Americans and tribal access to the U.S. Court of Claims, addressing the two major issues at the forefront of public debates on the “Indian problem” at the time – the ambiguity of Native American legal status and the Office of Indian Affair’s mismanagement of Native lands and resources.

The investment of people’s time and unpaid labor in the work of the Society and its journal was extraordinary but ultimately unsustainable, and the SAI dissolved in 1923. Disappointingly, it had achieved neither of its major goals. Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, granting birthright citizenship to Native Americans but maintaining their wardship status. The Indian Claims Commission took over twenty more years to come, in 1946, allowing tribes to bring claims against the US government through judicial arbitration, not a court, and successful claims could result only in monetary compensation, not regained lands. The SAI also could not succeed in delivering a unified expression of Native American opinion to the government and public – probably the most unrealistic aim of all.

Despite its “failures,” the Society of American Indians was the first organization of its kind, created by Native Americans to amplify a Native American voice across the country during a time when people’s lives were under siege and they battled to have their voices heard on multiple issues. It may not have lasted long, but the SAI left a legacy of political, legal, and intellectual activism, setting the course for the many Native professional organizations to follow, and standing as part of an ever-present, ongoing continuum of Native Americans advocating for their best interests; joining in the debate as to what that might look like or how to get there; and striving to build better, stronger, and healthier relationships with the rest of the nation.

Maybe consensus is less important than joining in the conversation. Whether you are celebrating Columbus Day, commemorating Indigenous Peoples’ Day, or just slogging through another Monday – that door is always open.

The Society of American Indians, 5th Annual Conference, on the steps of Engineering Hall, Kansas University, October 1, 1915. *The Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians, Volume 3, 1915.*

September 11, 2024

Happy to be here and looking forward!

Contributed by Lainie Schultz

Hi, all. My name is Lainie Schultz, and I am the brand-new Curator of Education here at the Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology. I come to this position from the George Peabody Museum of Anthropology (aka the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, or PMAE), where I was previously the Head of Teaching and Learning. It is also where my career in museums began, as an undergrad looking for a federal work-study position. At the time I just thought it would be a relatively painless way to make some money, but it turned out I genuinely cared about museums and the relationships they build with descendant communities. Who would have guessed?

This led me to graduate school in anthropology, and a few more museum stops along the way. In between stints at the PMAE I was introduced to the culture of morning and afternoon tea in the Repatriation Unit of the National Museum of Australia (sometimes the tea is coffee); was thrown into the world of First Nations humor during consultation visits at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (do you know how to pronounce Kwakwaka’wakw? Gitxaała? just bragging…); learned to throw a returning boomerang at Muru Mittigar Aboriginal Cultural and Education Centre (key word “throw.” darned thing never returned); pretended along with the Cultural Collections and Community Engagement section of the Australian Museum that our already well-worn office demountables were only “temporary” (humor came in handy there, too); marveled like the nerd I am at the Berndt Museum of Anthropology’s catalogue records (THEY ARE. SO. COMPLETE.); and stayed with family I didn’t know I had before while at Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre (that had nothing to do with the cultural center, but it really meant a lot to me).

I don’t know what new experiences the RSPI will be throwing at me, but I am ready for it all.

Give me what you’ve got!