Raynard Kington, Head of School, and I headlined a regional event for Phillips Academy alums, parents, and friends on October 28. About 45 people came together at the Penn Museum to share their love of Andover and learn about the Peabody Institute—past, present, and future. It was great seeing some current parents and recent graduates, as well as longtime friends of the Peabody. Dr. Kington and I covered some of our favorite topics, including the Ancient Mediterranean Collection and paleofeces, as well as how the campus museums impact learning today. Attendees were able to wander through the Penn Museum’s Middle East gallery, including some remarkable items from Nippur and Ur.
Attendees at the October 28th regional event in Philadelphia.
Trips to Philadelphia are always a highlight for me. I was fortunate to conduct research on the Penn Museum’s remarkable Florida collections during my dissertation research, including Frank Hamilton Cushing’s Court of the Pile Dwellers (also known as Key Marco). The Penn Museum staff was always very kind, allowing access to the subbasement collections and pointing out interesting places to eat or sights to see. I also learned about a slightly offbeat, but super cheap place to stay: the Divine Tracy. Owned and operated by the International Peace Movement, a somewhat unorthodox religious movement governed by a strict modesty code, a commitment to hard work, and an aversion to credit and borrowing. To stay at the Divine Tracy in the 1990s, one had to call, explain when you wanted to be there, learn the cost ($50 to $75 a week!), and then mail a postal money order.
Brochure for the International Peace Movement’s Divine Tracy Hotel, undated.
I had a chance to wander past the Divine Tracy—now The Axis apartments, located on the corner of Ludlow and N. 36th streets. Gone is the first-floor cafeteria, the mid-century furnishings, and harried UPenn and Drexel students seeking a refuge to work on their theses and dissertations, away from telephones, TVs, and other distractions. Diggin around in my files I was delighted to find a brochure that I had kept from the Divine Tracy.
Thank you to all who came out to enjoy the evening with us, and for all your great conversation and questions. Philly, ‘til next time!
I started at the Peabody Institute right at the midpoint of its building renovations. Phase 1 had just completed; phase 2 was just gearing up. It was a false sort of calm, when operations largely appeared stable, especially for someone new who didn’t know any better. On the rare moments, though, when I wasn’t too busy trying to figure out what on earth was a Phillips Academy, I would look up and notice the gaps in the norm. Like the empty display case standing opposite my office door, inside what is now my primary teaching space. I was told its occupant had been temporarily moved to the Addison Gallery of American Art until the chaos of construction was fully completed, and occasionally it would occur to me, “Oh, yeah. Something belongs in there.” Occasionally, too, it would occur to me, “Dude is going to be looking right at me.” I really hoped that we were going to be friends, because no one needs an officemate giving them the stink eye…
Glamor shots of my absent associateRSPI 98.20.1
Our Addison colleagues recently returned the occupant of our exhibit case, and I am relieved to confirm it makes a lovely companion. It has a “hey, girl” swagger that says it’s ready to hang, with a Boston attitude that says it’s cool if I don’t say hi every time I walk by.
It has also proven to be an excellent co-instructor. It inspires more interest and questions from students than anything I have ever actually prepared for them (I am not yet jealous. Give me time). So, for all the students visiting my classroom, and for all my would-be visitors, here are the answers to your three most frequently asked questions:
1. Yes, it is real.
2. It is an auk, and its name is Champ.
Great Auks were flightless birds that lived in large colonies along the shores of the north Atlantic, breeding on isolated rocky islands off of Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and some of the British Isles. At times they would paddle south, reaching as far as Florida and northern Africa. Agile in the water, they were clumsy on land, making them easy targets for human hunters who started to prey on them in the sixteenth century for their meat, eggs, and feathers.
The closer the birds came to extinction the greater the interest in them grew, as trophies as much as for scientific study. By the early 1800s, collectors were paying huge sums for a single egg or skin, driven by the dealers and auction houses supplying them. The Great Auk’s end came in 1844, when, as the story goes, the last two birds were hunted by a collecting expedition on Iceland’s Island of Eldey, the breeding pair’s egg broken in the process.
About eighty Great Auk taxidermy specimens are known to exist, as well as about seventy Great Auk eggs. With so many interested in these preserved remains and so few available, Great Auks took on the names of their collectors, be they individuals or institutions. This is how our auk, owned by Phillips Academy and residing in a Peabody Institute classroom, came to be known as “Champley’s Auk,” or, as we prefer, Champ. Robert Champley (1829-1895) was a Scarborough, England Alderman, the eldest son of a wealthy druggist, ship-owner, and baths proprietor, whose obsession for collecting natural history specimens was commensurate with that of a Victorian man of means. In addition to this auk – once living in Iceland, later sold by Mechlenburg, Apothecary of Flensburg – Champley acquired nine auk eggs from dealers around Europe.
When Champley died in 1895, his collection passed to his daughter, who sold it at auction in 1902. Champley’s Auk was purchased by J. B. Nichols, with whom it stayed until Nichols’ death in 1929. The auk went once again to auction, where a dealer purchased it in June of that year on behalf of an unnamed client. Thereafter, Champley’s Auk was largely lost to the world, with researchers unable to say where it was or whether it still existed. 65 years later, a letter located in the Phillips Academy Archives confirmed that the Phillips Academy Auk and Champley’s Auk were, in fact, one and the same: In 1934, the school wrote to Thomas Cochran regarding his donation of an auk, asking for details of the bird’s origins. Cochran’s secretary replied to say that Mr. Cochran knew virtually nothing of the bird’s prior history, but that he had bought it at auction in London on June 11, 1929.
Thomas Cochran was a Phillips Academy alum (Class of 1890) and a major benefactor of the school, helping to shape the campus as we know it today through construction of, among other spaces, the Addison Gallery of American Art; George Washington Hall; Cochran Chapel; the Vista; and the Cochran Wildlife Sanctuary – aka the bird sanctuary. Hmm.
3. It’s spelled a. u. k.
Hey, girl. We don’t need a taxidermist to preserve our love.
Every summer departments across Phillips Academy host Scholar programs – an opportunity for rising 11th and 12th graders to conduct an independent research project of their choosing, with support from a faculty or staff advisor. Interested students submit their research proposals the winter prior; selected applicants use the spring to prepare any resources they require; and summer is spent immersed in the work. This past year, the Peabody Institute joined PA’s cohort of hosts, mentoring our first annual Peabody Scholar. Below, George Richardson gives us an insider account of the experience…–Lainie Schultz
What do teary-eyed Snapchat stories, ham-and-spinach omelets, and Raye’s My 21st Century Blues have in common? These were just a few of the many coping methods that got me through the 41-page paper that would be known as The Settler’s New Clothes: Coachella, Follower Counts, “Boho-Chic,” and the Dual Dispossession of Indigenous Regalia. Wordy? I know.
Before I detail those drawn-out Thursday nights spent mulling over whether wearing a headdress at Coachella is appropriation or appreciation, let me take you back to the beginning. No, not the first stage of research, the true beginning: my inbox.
It all started with an Outlook notification inviting me to a Scholar Information Session. The main attraction? Free pizza. The dining hall was looking particularly unappetizing that evening, so with an empty stomach and low expectations, I climbed the treacherous stairs of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library to the Tang Institute. Naturally, I sat near the front, well within arm’s reach of the greasy American delicacy that would fuel my attention span for the next hour.
When the meeting ended, we broke out into interest groups: OWHL, Brace Center for Gender Studies, PA Sustainability Coalition, or, best of all, the Peabody. Why pick the Peabody, might you ask? Honestly, my odds looked best there since I was only competing against 5 other people. A few months later, an email confirmed it: I had the job.
Jump to the start of my research. I knew I wanted to explore cultural appropriation at music festivals, but I had zero direction. So, naturally, I procrastinated on TikTok. The algorithm gods were clearly watching, because the very first video on my feed was influencer Natalie Reynolds showing off her 2025 Coachella outfit, which she proudly described as having an “Indian vibe.”
Just like that, my project was born: Non-Native festivalgoers wearing Native American headdresses. I hopped out of bed, opened a Google Doc, and started outlining.
What followed was a complete blur. Between 10 AM Monday check-ins with Dr. Schultz and endless late-night dives into the Internet Archive and JSTOR, I became utterly consumed. Narrowing the scope, though, was a nightmare. Every new journal article tempted me to change my entire thesis. There were moments I genuinely wondered: Am I moving the needle here, or is this just going to read like another non-Native person culture-policing?
To break through that anxiety, I completely reframed my approach. I stopped focusing on individual festivalgoers and instead landed at the crossroads of TikTok recommendation algorithms and the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990. By centering the paper on corporate platform designs and statutory compliance rather than ethics, I gave myself the space to critique systemic exploitation without playing into polarized rhetoric.
Despite that triumph, with three weeks left before the final deadline, I realized my current draft couldn’t be saved. So, I opened a fresh doc and turned to the Dangerous Writing App (it deletes your work if you stop typing for 5 seconds). That panic-fueled session birthed a raw 3-page outline. Over the next week, mostly between 3 AM and 8 AM, that outline ballooned into a 17-page draft. Two weeks of refining and addressing Dr. Schultz’s feedback later, I had a paper.
The final step was formatting: setting it to Times New Roman and hitting double-space. Instantly, what had felt like a standard draft transformed into a 41-page short story of everything I could possibly utter on the subject.
Looking back, the Scholar process was entirely worth it. The level of research and writing feedback is unlike anything else I’ve done inside or outside Andover. Sure, there were days my entire schedule was swallowed by the paper, and days when muttering the word “draft” near me would put you at serious health risk. But if you’re ever considering applying (whether pizza is your primary motive or not), do it. If only for the pure satisfaction of hitting double-space at the end. Thank you.
Title inspiration from Green, Rayna. “The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe.”Folklore99 (1988): 30-55.
Contributed by Katie Lincoln, Andover Summer Session Archaeologist
If you were to ask an archaeologist what the hardest part of the job is, you might expect them to answer with something physically demanding, like digging holes or spending late nights cleaning and classifying artifacts.
For many archaeologists, however, the hardest part of our jobs is translating tiny fragments of material culture into stories about people from the past – and finding ourselves in those stories along the way.
For example, how can one small ceramic fragment say something about those who made and used it? What can the presence or absence of certain objects change how we think about people? How do we know that our conclusions are correct and culturally sensitive?
Phillips Academy Summer Session students grappled with these questions as they embarked on their own archaeological dig this past July. Tasked with excavating a Revolutionary War-era mansion belonging to Phillips Academy’s founder, Samuel Phillips Jr., students took on the responsibility of collecting artifact data and interpreting it – both in their final written assignments and in their final exhibition. At every step, they were asked not just to identify what they found, but to imagine the students, staff, and community members who came before them and left these things behind.
Katie Lincoln close-looking at excavated objects with students
Over the course of their four-week-long excavation on Phillips Academy’s West Quad, students uncovered a wide variety of artifacts. As part of an assignment new to the Dig This! course this year, students were asked to use an artifact to make a broad interpretation about past life in Andover, at Phillips Academy, or at the Mansion House – and, in doing so, to draw a line between their own experience as students and the experience of the students whose lives they were piecing back together.
Their presentations exceeded expectations, revealing just how closely these summer session students came to identify with nineteenth and twentieth century Andover residents.
Example of a student assignment
Pencil ends and early twentieth-century print type, for instance, became evidence of a shared reality: students worked hard, even in their dorms, whether in 1926 or 2026. Looking at the worn-down pencils, our students recognized their own late nights in someone else’s.
A ceramic sherd with “HILL” transfer-printed on it told a similar story. Interpreted as nineteenth-century refined earthenware, likely part of a mug decorated with the Phillips Academy school seal, it was paired with a Worcestershire sauce bottle cap and various other glass artifacts. Students read this cluster of objects as evidence of meals shared at the Mansion House when it functioned as an inn and tavern – and imagined nineteenth-century Phillips students gathered there with friends and neighbors. Students identified that this experience was not so different from how they themselves might share a meal at Paresky Commons after a long day.
Overall, this summer’s excavation was a success. Students learned and mastered archaeological field methods including site mapping, artifact identification, and field paperwork. Most importantly, however, students learned how to use artifacts to speak to past peoples and experiences. More than that, they learned how to pull apart historical narratives and find themselves inside them – recognizing a fellow student’s hard work, worry, and routine across a gap of one or two hundred years.
We thank the students of the 2026 Mansion House Field Crew, and we look forward to incorporating more interpretive analysis in future iterations of the Dig This! Course.
Who knew that a statistics class could lead you to timing the cataloging of artifacts? That is exactly what happened to our group this spring, and we are so glad it did.
We are a group of Phillips Academy upperclassmen and seniors: Meara Wang, Jay Jung, Ayush Gupta, Tasnia Begum, and I, Sophia Lazar. We are enrolled in Mr. Noureddine El Alam’s Project-Based Statistics class, where students apply statistical methods to solve real-world problems for real partners. Rather than solely working through textbook exercises, we take on actual projects with organizations and institutions, gathering data, running analyses, and presenting findings that can make a tangible difference. Past classes have partnered with places like the Addison Gallery of American Art and the PA Admissions Office, and when Mr. El Alam introduced the Peabody as an option, our team knew right away that it was the one for us. We wanted to work on something that genuinely inspired us, and the Peabody fit perfectly.
Our project centers on a question the Peabody has been grappling with: how long would it actually take to bring the museum’s artifact catalog up to an excellent standard, and what would better staffing make possible? To answer that, we needed data on the cataloging process itself, specifically how long it takes to catalog different types of artifacts. That meant a visit to the Peabody’s temporary location, where John Bergman-McCool and Marla Taylor walked us through a hands-on mock session. Because working directly with the real collection is not always feasible, John and Marla guided us through a range of representative mock artifacts so we could time the process across different object types and gather enough data points for a meaningful analysis. It was hands-on, eye-opening, and honestly a lot of fun.
With that data in hand, we are now building a statistical model to estimate how long a full cataloging effort would take under different staffing scenarios. The idea is to take our timing measurements, account for the variety of artifact types in the collection, and project out what various levels of staffing could realistically accomplish over time. The final report will go directly to the Peabody, and we hope it gives them something genuinely useful as they plan for the future.
What surprised me most was how much I came to care about the outcome. When you walk through a collection and realize just how much history is sitting there, waiting to be properly documented and shared with the world, the stakes feel very real. We came into this wanting to do meaningful work, and we are leaving with a much deeper appreciation for everything that goes into preserving and making accessible our shared cultural heritage. We hope our work makes a real difference!
The team together at the Peabody’s temporary location during our data collection session.Marla Taylor walking Meara through the steps of cataloging a mock artifact.
Hi, I’m Aaron Bai, and I’m an upper (11th grader) at Phillips Academy. I’ve always been interested in history and the humanities. As a child, I would spend hours in the school library reading books on mythology and history from cultures all around the world. As I grew older, I would read and even write about interesting topics in my free time, from the Garamantes during the Roman Empire to modern extremism in the Sahel. I have come to believe that only through studying human culture and society throughout its history can we better understand who we are and how we came to be. Though the present may differ considerably from the days of Lucius Cincinnatus or George Washington, for instance, their legacies and the similarities in the challenges and decisions we face make it such that uncovering their stories unmasks more of our own.
Following my interests, I chose to work at the Peabody for my work-duty requirement during my lower year (10th grade). This turned out to be a great decision— I had the rare opportunity to help organize, document, and analyze the Peabody’s vast collection of artifacts, from Neolithic stone tools to Native American ceramics. Working closely with these objects allowed me to engage directly with material history and learn the stories behind them in a unique and deeply meaningful way. This year, with work duty completed, I have continued to volunteer at the Peabody every week, helping research and document its collection of coinage from the Ancient Mediterranean, which serves as an amazing window into the societies and belief systems of the ancient world.
Given my interest in anthropology, I joined the Andover Anthropological Society last year, a student club here on campus, and later applied to take on a leadership position. Now serving as co-president of the club, I hope to raise awareness of this remarkable resource at our school and expand opportunities for students to engage with the Peabody and the collections there, whether through open houses, workshops, or research projects. It may even be worthwhile exploring engagement beyond the student body, such as inviting local schools to participate in open houses or lectures. In any case, I am very excited and look forward to working with the Peabody on these initiatives.
Aaron sharing his coin research with members of the Phillips Academy campus.
My name is Barrett Kim, and I’m an upper (11th grader) at Phillips Academy interested in biological sciences, though what draws me most isn’t exclusively the science, but the philosophical questions of how we got here.
I came across anthropology very spontaneously. A friend mentioned a research project through the Andover Anthropological Society, specifically exploring gender dynamics in Indigenous artifacts. Their hard work and insightful research immediately fascinated me. Around the same time, I was reading Orwell, Bradbury, and Salinger, writers who kept returning to the same warning: societies fail when they forget their own past. Anthropology felt like the applied, real-life version of the messages those books portrayed. If you want to understand where humans are going, you must understand where we’ve been. Anthropology turned out to be the perfect intersection of biology and sociology, two fields most people treat as completely separate.
Coming into Phillips Academy, I had no idea what anthropology was; however, after exploring the field and its importance, I felt like I had to help share what I learned. This desire to inspire others made me pursue a leadership role with the club and the Peabody Institute, not because I had everything figured out, but because I wanted to guide others into learning anthropology’s importance.
Looking ahead, I’m really excited to work with the Peabody. We have a professional archaeological institute on our campus, and most students walk right past it. Next year I want to help encourage students to use this valuable resource to explore our past and shape the understanding of our futures. Working with Aaron, we envision a place where genuine questions can be passionately explored, and where the work we do helps expand people’s worldviews.
Barrett (left) at a Peabody event organized by the Phillips Academy Biology Club.
In January of this year, Peabody Institute staff were kicked out of the Peabody Institute building as the start of renovations loomed near. Fortunately, construction elsewhere at Phillips Academy meant that the Dean of Students moved into new digs, leaving available their suite in the basement of George Washington Hall to claim as our temporary-own. A Goldilocks fit, the space had five desks available for five Peabody folk, plus a bonus meeting room for meetings.
Or – could it be a meeting room for classes? Lore tells of Peabody staff moving into the School Room on the Abbot Academy campus for the first phase of building renovations. To continue teaching classes, staff valiantly packed up boxes of collections, carrying them from classroom to classroom along with all their teaching supplies: gloves, ethafoam, trays, and, goodness help them, laptops.
I wasn’t at the Peabody yet, so I have only heard the tale. It sounded very impressive and intrepid and like quite the adventure, and every lazy bone in my body knew I wanted nothing to do with it. And so, with my colleagues, I began carefully planning every piece of furniture we would bring over to our GW bonus room, with every permutation of every collections activity thought out. We measured twice and cut once, determined to make this suite available for teaching.
There is nothing more satisfying than a carefully considered plan that actually goes exactly as intended. Is it sometimes maybe slightly cramped? Yes. Does it always work? Yes. Am I a little smug? Oh, heck, yes.
Trying our hands (and waists and legs) at some new instruments with MUS410 Your Musical Brain.
Meeting the Inuit who met the Vikings with HSS100B Sojourns Across a Connected World.
Prepping for the ceramics studio with ART302 Clay and the Ancestral Pot. (What? Room to stand up and walk around? Incredible.)
Imagining the world of the New Testament with PHR330 New Testament.
My name is Jack Angelo and I am a board member and Blog Lead in Andover’s Anthropological Society, a student club we created here at Phillips Academy last year. I first became interested in Anthropology because of the many different topics it could cover, allowing someone to perform curiosity-based research about whatever subject matter interests them. When the other board members and I created the club, we knew most of our members’ research and curiosity would be directed towards our more major projects working in tandem with the Peabody Institute. But, understanding that the larger, focused research projects did not allow total intellectual freedom for the whole club, and that it did not spread our club’s messaging to the whole campus, we decided to create the Andover Anthropological Society Blog Site.
Our blog has now run for almost nine months and has served as an amazing display of the various topics our members are interested in, such as Corporate Consumerism in America, The Rise of Digital Tribalism, and the History of Art in Quarantine. Each post reflects what genuinely interests our writers, allowing people to contribute to the club without having to take part in our larger projects. In this way, the blog has developed into exactly the kind of free representational space we hoped for.
Additionally, the blog is a public source for anybody to read to understand our club’s messaging or to just further their interest in anthropology. We wanted to make sure that what we’re doing in AAS isn’t limited to the people who show up to meetings. By putting our work online, we’re giving the whole Andover community access to the topics we’re exploring and the research our members are doing. If someone’s curious about anthropology but doesn’t know where to start, or if they just want to read about a specific topic, the blog is there for them.
Ultimately, the AAS Blog is about making anthropology accessible. We wanted to create something that anyone could engage with, regardless of whether they’re in the club or have any background in the field. By keeping our work public and covering topics that connect to everyday life, we’ve built a resource that’s open to the entire Andover community.
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.
Our Peabody annual report for academic year 2024-2025 has just been released online! This report features educational participation at the Peabody, including over 1,600 students and 30 Phillips Academy instructors. In addition, our report features institutional highlights, updates on our collections and NAGPRA work, collaborations with students and researchers, and more!
Thank you to everyone who supported the completion of another wonderful year at the Peabody!
