The Peabody

February 14, 2023

Behind the Photograph: Flammable Film

Contributed by Emma Lavoie

*Stuart Travis mural at the Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology*

Ever wonder what lies behind a photograph? Beyond the simple description scrawled on the back of each image? The Peabody collection contains more than 600,000 artifacts, photographs, and documents. The Peabody’s photograph collection, specifically, is extensive and contains many interesting, yet untold stories. To bring these stories and photographs to light, we would like to share them with YOU, fellow readers, in our blog series, Behind the Photograph. You can find these stories using our BehindThePhoto tag on our blog.

The Mural

As the Peabody enters the pre-construction phase of a much-needed renovation project, I’ve been looking back at some of our old photos of the building. This image in particular is fascinating, as it was taken during the installation of the Peabody’s Stuart Travis mural in 1938. Those of you who have visited the Peabody may find the room in this image familiar – it’s the interior of our front entrance door! Although those columns behind the mural have since been removed, the crown molding, floor, and archways are still present at the Peabody today. Around the perimeter of the image you’ll find what looks to be an old grandfather clock against the wall to the left. If you peer closely just through both archways (to the right and left) you’ll see glimpses of exhibit cases where the Peabody’s first floor galleries housed exhibits and displayed artifacts.

The Peabody’s mural was created by American artist, illustrator, and designer, Stuart Travis (1868-1942). Stuart Travis is well-known to the Phillips Academy Andover community. Not only can you find his work at the Peabody, but all over – the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library, Paresky Commons, the Gelb science building, and the wrought iron gate at the entrance to the Moncrieff Cochran Bird Sanctuary. Stuart Travis is buried in the Chapel Cemetery here on campus.

The mural was installed in the Peabody’s central staircase where it continues to reside today. Titled “Culture Areas of North America,” this mural reflects ideas about anthropology and archaeology in the 1930s and 1940s. The mural features many drawings of artifacts from various sites and museum collections, some drawings even link to archaeological works by long-time Peabody Director, Warren K. Moorehead (1924-1938) as well as Director, Douglas Byers (1938-1968) and Curator, Fred Johnson (1936-1968).

The mural was dated 1938, however, Stuart Travis continued to make additions through 1942. The mural was later restored in 1997 by Christy Cunningham-Adams through the generous support of the Abbot Academy Fund. If you look closely at the image, you’ll see the mural was created in sections (i.e. the very fine line located down the middle of the mural). One interesting detail you cannot see from the photo, but rather in person is the various pencil notes and markings that still remain on the mural. This leads me to believe that perhaps the mural was never quite finished or rather, some new additions planned for the mural never came to fruition.

For more information about the Peabody’s Stuart Travis mural, check out this blog by Peabody Director, Ryan Wheeler – Culture Areas of North America: The Peabody’s Stuart Travis Mural.

Another fascinating find and story is this blog from our past temporary archivist, Irene Gates, who discovered six small notebooks belonging to Stuart Travis depicting illustrations and information about the Indigenous communities represented in the mural.

The Film

Mural history aside, the material image itself has quite the hazardous history (or should we say fiery?) The original image of the mural installation was made on a nitrate negative, a type of film used as a base for photographic roll film created by George Eastman in 1889. Nitrate was used for photographic and professional 35mm motion picture film until the 1950s.

What many may (or may not) know is nitrate film is highly flammable and also toxic when decomposing with age. New nitrate film could ignite with the heat of a cigarette, while decomposing nitrate film can ignite spontaneously at temperatures as low as 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Once ignited, nitrate film burns rapidly, fueled by its own oxygen, and releasing toxic fumes.

Before you jump to thoughts of flammable film spontaneously combusting in the Peabody’s collections, let me assure you THERE IS NO nitrate film currently located at the Peabody. But at one point in time there used to be nitrate film in the Peabody’s archival photograph collection, YIKES! As of July 2010, all nitrate negatives were digitized and then discarded due to the film’s potential hazard to the Peabody collections and building.

With that out of the way, let’s dive in to the history of nitrate film and how much of this history went up in smoke. We see its legacy in Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage – a bus operator tells a young boy he cannot bring two reels of nitrate film onboard, it’s flammable after all. Then in Quentin Taratino’s Inglourious Basterds – nitrate film’s volatile chemistry is used for his alternate history story of a plot to assassinate high-ranking officials of the Nazi party, including Hitler.

Nitrate fires were infrequent compared to the rapid spread of cinema, however, when disaster occurred at the hands of nitrate film, the results were quite devastating. One such fire occurred at Paris’s 1897 Charity Bazaar, claiming 126 lives many of which were women. In 2019, a French drama miniseries debuted on Netflix called Le Bazar de la Charité (The Bonfire of Destiny) depicting this destructive time in history.

The 1940s saw numerous fires in New York City involving nitrate film. Investigators found no evidence of negligence by personnel or the careless use of cigarettes. In fact, it appeared the nitrate film spontaneously ignited due to abnormally hot summers. Since burning nitrate produces its own oxygen, submerging the film in water is futile. In addition, the fumes given off by its ignition are highly toxic and hamper any efforts to suppress the fire. These fumes contain oxides of nitrogen which, if inhaled, can be fatal. Unfortunately, nitrate film must burn itself out.

Besides its combustive properties, nitrate is extremely fragile. Overtime, the film naturally shrinks and deteriorates, even when treated with care. Film archivists in the 1970s and 80s expressed urgency for the preservation of nitrate film using the slogan, “Nitrate Won’t Wait,” with images of the destruction of vault fires such as the 1978 vault fire at the National Archives and Records Service in Suitland, Maryland, which destroyed 12.6 million feet of historical newsreel footage and outtakes donated by Universal Pictures. As a result of this, many nitrate negatives and film have been digitized or reprinted on polyester stock (the replacement to nitrate beginning in the 1950s).

How to Spot Decomposition in Nitrate Film (sourced from the Science & Media Museum Blog)

1.) Fading picture with amber discoloration

2.) Film becomes brittle; emulsion becomes adhesive and film sticks together

(At stages 1 and 2, film can be copied)

3.) Film has a noxious odor

(At stage 3 some parts of the film may be copied)

4.) Film is soft and covered with a viscous froth

5.) Film is deteriorating into a brownish acrid powder

(At stages 4 and 5, film should be immediately destroyed by local fire department)

On the other side of the argument, many believe nitrate film is a viable artifact that doesn’t have to be destroyed or hidden away. In 2015, the Nitrate Picture Show was created by the Eastman Museum to raise awareness of nitrate and preserve what remains. The Eastman Museum currently houses 24,054 reels of nitrate film.

Circling back to our mural image – I’d like to provide the current status of our Peabody mural during the pre-construction phase of our planned renovation work. We are taking protective measures to keep it safe during upcoming renovation work. Here you can see a temporary wall being placed over the mural as a protective layer.

*The Peabody mural receiving a temporary wall for protection during building renovations.*

January 31, 2023February 14, 2023

How things have changed: The ongoing relationship between the Peabody Institute and The Phillipian

Contributed by Adam Way

This blog is the culmination of work done by Independent Researcher/Volunteer Adam Way to explore how the Peabody Institute has been portrayed by Phillips Academy students in The Phillipian over the years. Adam shared two previous blog posts about his work (Combing Through the Phillipian and Combing Through The Phillipian: End of an Era) and recently completed the project. His final blog is a summary of what he learned.

The relationship between The Phillipian and the Peabody Institute has existed since the Institute’s founding back in 1901, and while the strength of that relationship has waxed and waned, it has persisted nonetheless. During my time combing through over a century’s worth of The Phillipian issues, I have noticed a few substantial changes, mainly the amount of coverage that the Peabody Institute received, the type of coverage, and the student’s view of Peabody.

The first major difference that appears when looking through The Phillipian archives is that the number of times that the Peabody is addressed/mentioned decreases drastically towards the present. In 1910, the Peabody Institute, then the Department of Archaeology, was mentioned 153 times throughout the year, with the following years yielding similar results. A significant amount of the times that the Peabody Institute was mentioned in these early years can be attributed to the existence of extracurriculars that took place within the building. Events such as meetings of the Banjo or Drama clubs and other such student activities that took place in the Peabody make up a large portion of mentions, while the rest is composed of articles detailing the academic work and scholarship being conducted by the Institute.

The constant high volume of mentions during the early years of the Peabody Institute, unfortunately, do not last forever. It appears that the turning point was, more or less, when Warren K. Moorehead retired from his position as director and was replaced by Douglas Byers. While the overall number of yearly mentions had been on a steady decline since the beginning of the century, the number had remained relatively consistent and the articles were primarily focused on academic work and lectures at the Peabody Institute. This changed when Byers and curator Fred Johnson took over, as it appears that these two did not have as close of a relationship with the The Phillipian as Moorehead did. This trend continued, and arguably was exacerbated under Richard “Scotty” MacNeish. I believe that this divide can be attributed to a shift in focus from teaching in the classroom to fieldwork, as all three of these former directors placed a heavy emphasis on fieldwork, while there was a lack of a consistent archaeology and/or anthropology class during this period (with other factors playing into that decision like student interest). Luckily, in the time since MacNeish, the Peabody Institute has regained a stronger, and more frequent, presence in the The Phillipian.

The next major change that I noticed while conducting this research, was that the type of coverage that the Peabody received changed over the years. Initially, I noticed this change through the club announcements. As time went on, the number of clubs using the Peabody, or at least publishing that they were in The Phillipian, was declining. Nothing about this appeared to be out of the ordinary as clubs moved to other buildings and Peabody House was constructed for the purpose of holding social events and clubs. The part that seemed strange to me was when members of the Peabody staff and faculty would leave without a single mention of their departure and only a brief mention when their replacement had been found, as was the case with Dick Drennan in 1977. However, as time progressed, the type of coverage in this area also shifted. Not only was there an article detailing the departure of the previous director, Malinda Stafford Blustain, but there was a subsequent article about the hiring of her replacement, Ryan Wheeler. It appears that the relationship between the The Phillipian and the Peabody Institute is steadily returning to its former strength.

The last major change that I have noticed is the waxing and waning of student interest in the Peabody Institute over the years. As with the other two variables that changed over time, student interest seemed to peek early on before dropping drastically as time progressed. After Moorehead’s departure and the subsequent drop in attention received from The Phillipian, the Peabody became increasingly referred to as a “hidden gem” and “unused asset.” There were even pieces written as a joke that say a student died of boredom due to their visit to the Peabody. Pieces like these are written in good fun, however, it does highlight the disparity between how involved students once were and how involved they are now. As with the other two changes that I noticed, this too is changing for the better in recent years. While there are still joke articles, there are fewer instances where the Peabody is labeled as an “unused asset.” There appears to have been a positive reception of student travel programs in the recent past as well as current lectures and other programs offered by the Peabody Institute.

While my time combing through The Phillipian has come to a close, I am glad to see that the Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology is making a resurgence within the paper. The records showed that the institution has been through some difficult times and yet has prevailed and is strengthening its place within the Academy and student life.

January 27, 2023January 31, 2023

Student Volunteer Voices

Contributed by Elizabeth Reppas, Anthony Chung Yin Woo and John Bergman-McCool

Here at the Peabody, we are fortunate to have students assist us with collections-related projects. Work duty is the primary avenue for students to help our small staff, but we also rely on non-work duty students who volunteer in various ways during their free time. As we prepare for building renovations, work duty assignments have been canceled at the Peabody for the academic year. However, a few dedicated student volunteers have continued to come each week to help us as we approach the start of construction. We’ve asked them to share a bit about their experiences:

Hi! I am Elizabeth Reppas, and I am a three-year senior from Washington DC. I have always really loved visiting museums and learning how they work, so when I learned that I could volunteer at the Peabody Institute, I was very interested. I have been volunteering since the winter of my upper year and have gotten to help with a range of projects from organizing objects to creating an exhibit.

I first started helping with inventory like labelling and sorting objects. As I learned more about the artifacts, I got the chance to help curate an exhibit with projectile points and textiles from Tamaulipas Mexico for one of the exhibit cases. I helped with all things from choosing the objects and photos for the case to writing the explanations and putting the pieces together. I finished off the year with that exhibit, which was up on display for reunion weekend. It was particularly meaningful because it was in honor of Maya Cointreau ’92 supported by her classmates. Now, this year, I have helped with smaller projects like putting together an interactive activity for the Andover Historical Society and reviewing new objects, but I have mostly been helping to sort and organize the collections as the Peabody gets ready for its renovations.

I have loved these past two years working at the Peabody. I have learned a lot about archeology and how objects are excavated. I have also gotten to learn more about Andover and places around us since many of the Peabody’s artifacts come from nearby. And lastly, and for the reason I initially joined, I have gotten to learn more about collections: taking care of objects, doing inventory, and learning about ethically acquiring, maintaining, and displaying artifacts. Overall, I love the time I have spent volunteering and am excited for what is to come with the Peabody.

I’m Anthony and I’m a Phillips Academy student volunteering at the Peabody. Currently, I’m an eleventh grader living in Tucker House on campus, though I call the city of Hong Kong my home.

Since tenth grade, I’ve been involved with the Peabody, first through the work duty program, then by reaching out to become a student volunteer. The work I do at the Peabody varies a lot, which involves hands-on tasks such as sorting through artifacts, rehousing them in small Ziploc bags, and climbing up rickety wooden ladders to correctly label the new archival boxes in their respective bays, all as part of the rehousing project at the Peabody. Other work that I’ve done at the Peabody includes writing condition reports for artifacts that are used in classes as well as packaging old pamphlets for storage. More recently, I was involved with calculating and measuring the space required for to move all the boxes from the basement to the first floor, in preparation for the renovation work that will soon commence in the building.

To me, the Peabody has always been a place where I am able to take my mind off class work and come into close contact with items from decades, centuries, or perhaps epochs ago. Having visited a fair amount of museums before, it was eye opening for me to see the massive logistical challenges and the large amount of work that the Peabody staff and volunteers have to put into overcoming these challenges, along with digitizing artifact data and developing strict procedures to categorize and label the objects. My experiences at the Peabody have allowed me to better appreciate the people who work in the field of taking care of objects that are historically and culturally significant, particularly as we investigate the previously silenced histories of subjugated people across the globe.

January 12, 2023

The Repatriation Project by ProPublica

For more than a year, a dedicated reporting team at ProPublica has been exploring NAGPRA and repatriation. They have been investigating what is behind the overall slow return of ancestral remains back to descendant communities. Their work has culminated in The Repatriation Project:

America’s Biggest Museums Fail to Return Native American Human Remains

The remains of more than 100,000 Native Americans are held by prestigious U.S. institutions, despite a 1990 law meant to return them to tribal nations. Here’s how the ancestors were stolen — and how tribes are working to get them back.

Behind ProPublica’s Reporting on Repatriation

Our reporters answer frequently asked questions about The Repatriation Project from leaders and citizens of tribal nations.

Does Your Local Museum or University Still Have Native American Remains?

Three decades after legislation pushed for the return of Native American remains to Indigenous communities, many of the nation’s top museums and universities still have thousands of human remains in their collections. Check on institutions near you.

They also compiled a database that allows you to explore information related to individual institutions and tribes. For example, you can see where the statistics place the Peabody Institute on repatriation. There is always more work to be done and I hope you can watch those numbers change over the next few months.

I am excited to see where they take the project next!

December 20, 2022September 3, 2024

Nick at the Museum

Contributed by Nick Andrusin

Hi! My name is Nicholas Andrusin (or just Nick), and I am the new Temporary Educator/Collections Assistant at the Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology! I began in early November, and I am so excited to be a part of the Peabody and work with the staff! In this position I will be helping with the ongoing renovation project and teaching lessons.

Before moving to North Reading , MA in August 2022 I was living in Rochester, NY, where I earned a master’s degree in history at SUNY Brockport with a focus on public history. There I spent time as an intern at the Rochester Museum and Science Center where I helped them with their own storage renovation project. As well as helping the Rochester city historian create their Stonewall: 50 Years Out exhibit for the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

This position at the Peabody feels made for me! So far, I have been helping with a variety of collections related projects. From cataloging, to getting measurements of storage space, to rehousing objects into proper storages containers for the eventual move, they are exactly the kinds of tasks I love doing. In addition, I have also been helping to teach lessons to Phillips Academy students! From Tarps, which simulate a basic archaeological dig, to lectures on the Taíno people, the group who discovered Christopher Columbus. It has been a pleasure to flex my teaching muscles!

(that’s me in the gray hoodie!)

Museums have always been of huge interest to me, and I am fortunate enough to have had a small hand in helping several of them over the years, the Peabody being the most recent and exciting! I am so thankful and delighted to be a part of this team, and I cannot wait to see what the future holds.

December 17, 2022December 18, 2022

Tsankawi

Following up on my September 7, 2022 post about our family visit to Arizona and New Mexico, specifically about hikes at Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque, I wanted to share another highlight: Bandolier National Monument. We learned a lot by visiting the National Park Service interpretive center and hiking through the amazing Ancestral Puebloan sites in Frijoles Canyon, including more petroglyphs, and cavates—expanded hollows in the volcanic rock that formed parts of living rooms and storage structures.

We got up early to drive from Jemez Springs to Santa Fe, allowing for a good visit to Bandolier. As we drove through Valles Caldera—another National Park Service site with tremendous cultural significance to Walatowa, the Pueblo of Jemez—we made a note that we needed to come back to explore on foot. Impressive deposits of obsidian and volcanic tuff lined parts of the highway in this area, a testament to the volcanic activity that produced the caldera some 1.25 million years ago. Part of our reason for the earlier departure was that the parking area at Frijoles Canyon fills up early, so we wanted to make sure we got in. It was worth it, as the recent rains had many desert plants in bloom amidst the Ancestral Pueblo ruins, culturally connected to many of the modern day Pueblo communities in both New Mexico and Arizona.

The deeply inscribed trail at Tsankawi, carved and worn into the soft volcanic rock of the mesa.

The rangers at the NPS interpretive center also recommended that we visit Tsankawi, another unit of the national monument and another Ancestral Pueblo, that we would pass on our way into Santa Fe—though it’s not particularly well marked or easy to find. We are grateful for this recommendation, as the hike through this largely unreconstructed Ancestral Pueblo had some amazing features. In Tewa the name for Tsankawi means “village between two canyons at the clump of sharp, round cacti.”

Ceramic sherds and an obsidian fragment on the surface of the Ancestral Pueblo Tsankawi. The only other visitors to the Pueblo reminded us not to take anything–we bonded over this moment.

Tsankawi is situated on another volcanic mesa and requires climbing some ladders to access much of the Ancestral Pueblo. Once on the mesa, visitors find the ruins of an ancient Pueblo village, more of the cavates like those in Frijoles Canyon, petroglyphs, as well as a deeply inscribed trail that leads along the top and sides of the mesa. This feature was what really captured my attention, because it was clearly an ancient feature of the place. Following the trail, it became clear that you were literally following in the footsteps of the Ancestral Pueblo people who once lived here and whose modern descendants live nearby in places like the Pueblo of San Ildefonso.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it was sherds of jet-black pottery from Tsankawi that archaeologist Edgar Lee Hewitt asked Maria and Julian Martinez to replicate for museum exhibits early in the twentieth century. Their experiments to replicate the pottery and then their own innovations launched Maria’s career as the famous potter of San Ildefonso Pueblo and the black-on-black pottery with shiny, abstract designs still sought after today. Early in Maria’s career, Peabody Institute staff member Carl Guthe worked with her to write Pueblo Pottery Making: A Study at the Village of San Ildefonso, published in 1924 by Yale University Press. This was part of Alfred Kidder’s broader Pecos Pueblo project—based out of the Peabody Institute from 1915 to 1929—and an acknowledgment of the connections between modern Pueblo communities and their ancestors. Guthe’s research also brought several of Maria and Julian’s pieces into the museum, including a marvelous platter and a rare demonstration set with examples of each stage in the manufacture of the black-on-black pottery. Several of these pieces are on loan to the Addison Gallery of American Art for an upcoming exhibit Women and Abstraction: 1741-Now.

December 12, 2022December 13, 2022

Introducing our Peabody Annual Report 2021-2022

Contributed by Emma Lavoie

Our Peabody annual report for academic year 2021-2022 has just been released! This report highlights student participation at the Peabody, including more than 1,300 students who visited for classes, work duty, and more! In addition, our annual report features new acquisitions, classes, and workshops along with updates on our collection and NAGPRA work. Thank you to everyone who supported the completion of another wonderful year at the Peabody!

You can read the report in its entirety HERE.

November 30, 2022

Conference Season

Contributed by Marla Taylor

October/November is conference season! I was an active participant in multiple conferences over the past couple months and really enjoyed connecting with colleagues after the worst of COVID.

First, I attended the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA) 8^th Annual Repatriation Conference in New Buffalo, Michigan. The conference “brings together Native Nations, museums, artists, spiritual leaders, academics, lawyers, federal and state agencies, international institutions, collectors and others to work together to reactivate relationships with the past to create a world where diverse Native cultures and values are lived, protected and respected.”

It was a fantastic experience. The Repatriation Conference is a space where I greeted so many colleagues with hugs and made new and important connections. The speakers shared meaningful perspectives and insights and I am proud to be a part of that community. Oh, and the sunrise ceremony by the host Pokagon Band of Potawatomi was an invigorating way to start the day!

The second conference (only one week later!) was the 2022 International Conference of Indigenous Archives, Libraries, and Museums hosted by the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM) in Temecula, California. I love ATALM as an experience. I learn so much from those sessions and surrounding myself with innovate professionals, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who work so hard to prioritize Indigenous voices and perspectives. A couple of shout-outs to my favorite presentations – Traditional plant-based methods for pest control and Your Neighborhood Museum.

At both the Repatriation Conference and ATALM, I was a presenter and shared the work that colleagues and I have done to create the Indigenous Collections Care (ICC) Working Group and Guide. The ICC is a group of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous museum professionals and academics, Tribal Historic Preservation Officers, collections staff, and NAGPRA coordinators who are working to create a Guide as a reference tool for people who interact regularly with Native American collections. The Guide will offer scalable considerations and templates for implementation, advocacy, and creation of policies and procedures for all areas of collections stewardship. This project has been a major focus of mine over the past couple years and I am proud to share our work with the broader community.

The third and final conference in my marathon was the New England Museum Association 2022 Annual Conference. Now, I was admittedly a little exhausted after traveling from New Hampshire to Michigan to New Hampshire to California and back home to New Hampshire so I only attended NEMA for a day to be a speaker. This session was slightly different and focused on demystifying decolonization/Indigenizing museum collections stewardship. I was joined by colleagues from the Boston Children’s Museum and The Trustees of the Reservation for this conversation. We received positive feedback from everyone and I hope it inspired someone to take a step forward in this work.

While I really did love the opportunity to connect with other professionals, I am happy to be done with conferences for the year! And I have to admit, I am already planning my schedule for 2023…

November 18, 2022

New Box Test Results

Submitted by John Bergman-McCool

The Peabody is preparing for exciting building improvements in our collections area that will begin in April of 2023. They will include new storage furniture and an HVAC system that will control temperature and humidity. In advance of the project, we initiated a few tests to see how the environment inside our collections boxes would respond to moving around our building.

In a previous test, we sought to understand how silica gel might help mitigate fluctuating temperature and relative humidity (RH). Environmental monitors were placed in two boxes containing collections; one with a sachet containing silica gel and one without. The values were compared against a monitor that was measuring the ambient temp and RH in our collections area. The initial results of those tests are summarized in a previous blog. The silica gel appeared to bring down RH inside the box. However, once the silica gel had fully adsorbed humidity, the boxes themselves also seemed to buffer against shifting RH levels.

Silica efficacy test in boxes that contain collections. ‘Silica’ and ‘Without Silica’ boxes don’t exhibit the wide ranging RH and show a small decrease in temperature compared to the basement environment they are stored in. As we later learned, the RH is influenced by the collections inside the boxes.

During the new test, monitors were placed inside two empty boxes. One box was located on the first floor and a second box was moved in and out of our HVAC controlled storage area on a weekly basis. The data from inside the box was compared to environmental monitors logging ambient temperature and RH in the test areas. The results were enlightening and clear within the first month. Unlike the boxes containing collections, the empty boxes very closely mirror the temperature and RH of the spaces in which they are placed.

Empty box test from first floor. Test Box temperature and RH compared against first-floor monitors F1-1, F1-2, F1-3. RH and temperature in test box closely mirrors conditions outside box.

Empty box test from the second floor. Test box moved into and out of HVAC controlled storage. Test unit temperature and RH compared against test units inside (F2-6) and outside (F2-4) HVAC storage. RH in test box closely mirrors conditions outside box.

The conclusion from our previous test that the boxes were buffering the collections within from environmental changes was incorrect. The box environment was buffered by the collections inside.

Organic collection items- including bone, wood, and botanical remains- can absorb and release moisture in the air. In our collection area the ratio of air to collection items is high. Collections may influence temperature and RH in the storage area, but it might be negligible. Inside the boxes that ratio is reversed; they hold more collections for a relatively small amount of air, which results in a microclimate. The box microclimate is influenced by the ability of collections to absorb moisture.

We now know that boxes don’t offer magical RH buffering abilities, but the empty box test did show us that they accomplish some buffering.

Looking closely at the box test that moved in and out of our HVAC storage in April 2022 shows that while temperature very quickly falls in sync with the new environment, RH may take as long as 24 hours to sync with the new conditions.

Empty Box test on second floor from April 2022. Analysis completed for highlighted areas included in tables below. Temp and RH peaks analyzed while outside HVAC storage numbered.

In addition, the test box environment has fewer peaks and valleys for RH (local maximums and local minimums), lower maximum increases and decreases in RH and temperature, and lower average increases and decreases in RH and temperature. Strangely, the test box had more temperature fluctuations while in HVAC storage. Some of the findings are included in the tables below.

While it was surprising to learn that our collections boxes don’t flatten large swings in RH and temperature, it is comforting to know that they are mitigating some of the fluctuations- not to mention protecting from other agents of deterioration like dust and light.

Analysis of Box environment against the environment outside of storage in April 2022. Outside of the HVAC storage the conditions inside the box and outside the box were similar enough to compare local maximums and minimums. Some local max. and min. values were small and have been included in larger trends in increasing and decreasing values referred to as ‘peaks’ in the following table.

Analysis of Box environment against the environment inside HVAC storage from April 2022. The local maximums and minimums did not match up for a 1:1 comparison. Maximum and average values were compared.

November 16, 2022November 16, 2022

A New Photo of Margaret Ashley Towle

Contributed by Ryan Wheeler

Several years ago as we organized the Peabody Institute’s extensive photographic collection, we came across a group of black-and-white prints that had not been flattened. These images relate to Warren Moorehead’s 1920’s era excavation of the Etowah mound group in Georgia. Any attempt to unroll the images would produce a tear and threatened to damage the prints. We did some research on techniques that might help these older prints relax a little, to no avail. Help was nearby, however, in the form of the Northeast Document Conservation Center or NEDCC, one of the leading paper and media conservation organizations in the country. We’ve used them before to digitize oversized maps and to scan black-and-white negatives.

The images were returned to us after conservation recently, and we also received high resolution digital versions. Most of the photos show items from the Etowah site, but one picture was of Margaret Ashley Towle, one of the pioneering female archaeologists of the southeastern United States. The image is marked on the reverse as “Etowah Ga 1928 Miss Ashley” and has our recent catalog number 2020.3.283. It is a wonderful complement to Frank Schnell Jr’s 1999 chapter “Margaret E. Ashley: Georgia’s First Professional Archaeologist,” which appeared in Grit-Tempered: Early Women Archaeologists in the Southeastern United States. She was also featured, sans photo, in Irene Gates’s Women of the Peabody blog in 2018.

Image of Margaret Ashley as a smiling young woman wearing a cloche hat and light-colored trench coat with collar turned up. She has several scarves loosely around her neck. Hazy, out of focus image of Warren Moorehead in the background. — Image of Margaret Ashley at the Etowah site, 1928. In the right background is a slightly out of focus image of archaeologist Warren Moorehead. The image has been cropped to exclude several cultural items from the site. Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology 2020.3.283.

Margaret Ashley was already well-versed in archaeology and was a skilled outdoorswoman when she worked with Warren Moorehead at the Etowah site, and went on to assist with his projects in Maine and to continue her own research in the Southeast. She also contributed to Moorehead’s Etowah Papers publication and published on her technique for illustrating pottery. According to Frank Schnell’s chapter in Grit-Tempered, Ashley married Moorehead’s main field assistant Gerald Towle in 1930. Unfortunately, Ashley’s marriage coincided with a significant hiatus to her training and research. We do know that after Towle’s death, Ashley completed her Ph.D. at Columbia with her dissertation later appearing as The Ethnobotany of Pre-Columbian Peru, number 30 of the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology (1961). Colleagues working in the Andes report that Ashley’s publication remains a significant resource. Ashley spent several decades as an unpaid research associate at the Harvard Botanical Museum where she worked with botanist Paul Mangelsdorf, who had also been encouraging Richard “Scotty” MacNeish’s interests in agriculture, also around this same time.

We are delighted that we have been able to recover this early photo of Margaret Ashley Towle. If you get a chance, get a copy of Grit-Tempered–the biographical entries also include Adelaide Bullen, another pioneering archaeologist with connections to the Peabody Institute!