Work duty students are back assisting with collections projects.
We are excited to announce that after a year-and-a-half hiatus, work duty resumed at the Peabody two weeks ago! Preparations in the months leading up to building renovations, scheduled for the winter of 2023, meant that Peabody staff couldn’t devote resources to overseeing work duty students. Once the renovations began, the building would be unsafe for students and staff.
The most daunting pre-construction project was moving thousands of collection boxes from the basement into temporary housing on the first floor. Help from work duty students would have been welcomed, but had we taken on students in the fall they would be looking for new assignments that winter, which didn’t seem fair to the students. We decided that work duty should be cancelled at the Peabody for the 2022-2023 academic year.
Collections boxes are moving into their new housing! This image was intentionally blurred to obscure the details of our new collections housing until the move has been completed.
Last fall, as construction began winding down, we were eager to bring work duty back. Organizing the collection in the newly renovated basement would be a larger undertaking than any of the pre-construction preparations. Generally, we knew students would be allowed back in the building this academic year, but we didn’t know an exact date. The Dean of Student’s office generously offered to take on students who were interested in working at the Peabody until we could safely bring them back.
Ultimate week is the perfect time to relax while working on a collections project.
Now that the students have returned, they have been assisting us with preparing the basement to receive collections from throughout the building. They have added foam to shelving, helped sort items by geographic region, and solved inevitable mysteries that crop up in the wake of a large move. Their help has made it possible for staff to focus on moving our collection into the basement.
We are very happy to have students back and look forward to the spring term when we can welcome the wider Phillips community into the building.
In July I enrolled in an online course, Policies for Managing Collections, through Museum Studies LLC. Their organization offers online museum study courses taught by experts in the field. They also offer a range of professional services to cultural institutions.
Over the four-week course, instructor John Simmons led our investigation of the purpose and function of collection management policies (CMPs). Simply stated, collections management includes everything that cultural institutions do to collect items, care for them, and make them available to the public. A CMP is a collection of policies that guide collection management activities and clarify who is responsible for making collections-related decisions.
The Policies for Managing Museum Collections text book. It’s a good read that I highly recommend.
In addition to myself, there were a handful of museum professionals from a diverse range of cultural institutions who were enrolled in the course. Each week we reviewed the different sections or policies typically included in a CMP. We were tasked with looking at the specific needs and critical issues facing our own institutions and we met remotely for discussions on the week’s readings.
Assignments were submitted to a forum and included writing sections of a CMP, critiquing a museum’s response to policy-related problems, and enumerating the policies required by our individual museums. Along with our instructor’s feedback, student responses regularly generated interesting discussions. In general, there were many opportunities to share knowledge with our peers and learn from each other’s experiences.
Some of the personal takeaways from the course included:
-A CMP should include a section on your institution’s legal organization or governing authority.
-No two CMPs are the same. Each CMP should be written with the specific structure, needs, and collection focus of the museum in mind. When writing a CMP, another institution’s policy can be informative, but it shouldn’t be copied.
-A CMP can be a stand-alone document, or it can be a collection of many separate policy documents.
-Policy is different from procedure. Policy provides the rules and guidelines for carrying out collection management duties. Procedures spell out how policy is followed on a day-to-day basis and should largely be excluded from policy documents. Exceptions to this rule include controversial collections management procedures such as deaccessioning. These procedures can be quite thorny and can be detailed in CMPs.
-CMPs are living documents. If a policy is not working, it can be reviewed and changed, but you’ll need a policy for reviewing and changing your policies.
The course was very informative and led me to think about our institution, its legal organization, and our collection in new ways.
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.
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.
Excavation profile with arrows indicating the location of Maize, La Perra Cave, Sierra de Tamaulipas.
Contributed by John Bergman-McCool
This blog represents the thirteenth entry in a blog series – Peabody 25 – that will delve into the history of the Peabody Institute through objects in our collection.
If you travel on state routes through the Northeast this time of year, you will likely witness a continuous stream of hand-painted signs advertising sweet corn. On a recent road trip through Maine, the oft-repeating signs got me thinking about all the places I’ve seen corn cultivated: Washington State, Arizona, the Midwest cornbelt and New England. A quick search on the internet reveals that modern corn varieties can be grown in USDA hardiness zones 3-11 (that’s just about everywhere!). Currently corn is an important crop for many economies across the globe (map of world corn production).
With corn seemingly grown nearly everywhere, you may wonder when and where did it first originate? This question has been the subject of debate among scientists for more than a century. Richard “Scotty” MacNeish, former director of the Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology and influential twentieth century archaeologist, played an important role in untangling maize’s history of domestication.
While a doctoral candidate in 1945, MacNeish was sent to Texas and northern Mexico to look for evidence supporting the theory that Mesoamerican migration into North America led to the development of mound building cultures. MacNeish found no link, but he did locate a series ruins, campsites, and dry caves that had the potential for long sequences of human occupation in Tamaulipas, a state in northern Mexico.
In 1948, MacNeish returned for a field season that included the excavation of three cave sites in the Sierra de Tamaulipas. The caves housed a surprising amount of very well preserved botanical remains. During the closing moment of the excavation in Tamaulipas, the crew had all but closed up shop and shipped off their specimens and equipment when three small maize (corn) cobs were recovered from La Perra cave. The excavations in Tamaulipas pushed the age of maize cultivation back to 2,500 BC. The discovery of what was then the earliest evidence of domestication in the Americas would shape the direction of MacNeish’s archaeological research.
Pre Nal-Tel maize fragment from La Perra Cave, Sierra de Tamaulipas.
A little over a decade later, spurred by colleagues in botany, MacNeish would search farther south for earlier evidence of maize cultivation. In 1961, after years of survey in Central America and southern Mexico, MacNeish found promising dry caves in the Tehuacán valley of Mexico. There he led a multidisciplinary team in the excavation of six cave sites. Among the many discoveries were maize remains recovered from layers dating to 4,700 BC. Tehuacán was theorized as the ancient seat of maize domestication.
Radiocarbon dating techniques utilized by MacNeish in Tamaulipas and Tehuacán required large amounts of carbon, frequently charcoal, that would be destroyed during the dating process. The resulting age was then assigned to artifacts (corn, stone tools, bone, etc.) that were found in the same layer as the charcoal. Developments in radiocarbon made in the 1980s meant that much smaller samples were required, reducing the chance that sampled artifacts would be completely destroyed. When this direct method was applied to maize from Tehuacán and squash from Tamaulipas, the results were up to 2,500 years younger than previously thought.
MacNeish’s comments in the margins of Bruce Smith’s 1995 book The Emergence of Agriculture.
The revisions resulted in prickly disputes about the age of domestication in the Americas. Eventually the dust up resulting from the new dating technique settled, due in part to new dates obtained from squash seeds that rooted domestication to an earlier date of 8,000 BC in Mexico.
MacNeish remained resolute that the dates he derived were accurate up until he passed in 2001. In 2012, Archaeologists returned to the cave sites in the Tehuacán Valley in search of maize remains. The team recovered new maize samples that corroborated the younger age for Tehuacán maize.
Recent research within the fields of microbiology and DNA have focused on the teosinte plant and the Balsas River as the probable ancestor and location for earliest cultivation of maize. Analysis of the DNA suggests that the plant was cultivated as early as 7,000 BC.
The fact that MacNeish did not locate the cradle of corn, shouldn’t take anything away from the massive effort he and his colleagues undertook during their search. As for the Tamaulipas maize, MacNeish himself credits his project in Tamaulipas for planting the seeds that would develop into the multidisciplinary approach he would adopt for much of his subsequent career.
Lately, the process of fully cataloging Adopt-A-Drawers has resulted in some interesting discoveries. The most recent of these comes from artifacts collected by Richard “Scotty” MacNeish in Tamaulipas, Mexico.
MacNeish went to Tamaulipas in 1945 hoping to find sites that predated the production of ceramics. In particular, he was searching for sites with long cultural sequences that he could use to tell the story of the development of human culture in Mesoamerica. During three field seasons, spanning ten years, MacNeish identified and excavated several village and cave sites in the Sierra de Tamaulipas and the Sierra Madre Oriental, two mountain ranges in Tamaulipas.
MacNeish’s Tamaulipas excavation areas.
MacNeish recovered a wide variety of items from the well-preserved cave deposits in Tamaulipas. Of these were two fragmentary bear canine-shaped pendants recovered from Armadillo Cave in the Sierra de Tamaulipas. They appear to have been burnt and MacNeish believed that they were fashioned from sandstone. When compared with real canines from a bear and unknown canid, it is clear that they are an imitation. For example, the Tamaulipas pendants have no enamel and they lack the same degree of detail. However, they do approximate the shape very effectively.
Left: Two Tamaulipas bear canine-shaped pendant fragments. Middle: Dog or coyote canine pendant from Ohio. Right: Bear canine pendant from Ohio.
One of the pendants was fractured below a possible enamel layer so they were both inspected under magnification. Surprisingly, they show signs of very thin layering more reminiscent of the annuli of shell. I asked our Director, Dr. Ryan Wheeler to take a look at them. Among those who work here at the Peabody, he is the resident expert on shell artifacts. Dr. Wheeler agreed they were shell.
Magnified View of bear canine-shaped pendant from Tamaulipas, showing annuli.
The fact that the pendants were made of shell led us to think about a possible connection with the Hopewell Culture. Several shell imitations of bear canines have been recovered from Hopewell mound sites. Additionally, the Hopewell developed a very large interaction sphere, traveling far and wide for trade materials. The Hopewell procured copper from Lake Superior, silver from Canada, obsidian from Wyoming, mica from the Blue Ridge Mountains and shell from the Gulf of Mexico.
We wondered if these pendants could have been a Hopewell trade object. Fortunately, the Peabody archives include MacNeish’s Tamaulipas excavation paperwork (digitized here). The first step to establishing a possible link was to determine the items’ age. Using charcoal from distinct layers excavated from the cave deposits, MacNeish was able to radiocarbon date the deposits. The layer containing the shell pendants dates to the Almagre Phase, roughly 2,200 to 1800BCE. This correlates to the Archaic period in the Ohio valley, about 2,000 years before the Hopewell developed. The Hopewell connection was out.
I also searched for bear remains found in northern Mexican archaeological contexts. A very quick review of available resources indicated that bear remains are not all that common in the region. The only positive return came in the form of bear long bones found at Casas Grandes in Chihuahua, Mexico. This was interesting, because the historical range of both Mexican grizzly and black bears include much of northern Mexico, including Tamaulipas state. It is very likely that humans and bear interacted in the past.
At Dr. Wheeler’s suggestion I reached out to Dr. Brad Lepper, Senior Archaeologist with the Ohio History Connection and José Luis Aguilar Guajardo, archaeologist in Tamaulipas, Mexico. They both responded with helpful information. Dr. Lepper was interested in the presence of the shell pendant and was unaware of anything similar coming from Archaic sites. He suggested consulting Cheryl Claassen’s book Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America for possible archaic examples, which I haven’t yet had a chance to read.
Dr. Lepper provided several examples from the Ohio History Connection’s collection of Middle Woodland Hopewell bear canine pendants (here and here) and their imitations (here and here). Some of the canines were split, or contained fresh water pearls from the Ohio River. Imitations were made from mica, copper, shell, bone, ceramic and stone.
José Luis Aguilar Guajardo was also very interested in the bear canine-shaped pendants. He was unaware of anything similar coming from sites in the Sierra de Tamaulipas mountains. He indicated that shell was a semi-precious material used for making ornamentation by the Indigenous people in the area. The Sierra de Tamaulipas mountains are quite close to the Gulf of Mexico, a source for shell materials.
José was clear that black bears can still be found in the Sierra de Tamaulipas, and supported the possibility that they were bear-shaped. However, he suggested the possibility that they were inspired by the jaguar instead. According to José, jaguar were abundant in the area and were revered by the Indigenous people.
How to assign an animal label to the pendants becomes an interesting problem. Bear and jaguar canines can look similar in size and appearance. Understanding what the maker of the pendants intended them to represent is difficult when they cannot be asked about them directly. Both animals’ habitats overlapped in northern Mexico.
Though they don’t provide a definitive answer, some helpful articles, and their authors, that explore the importance of bear and jaguar imagery in north and Mesoamerica include: Bear Imagery and Ritual in Northeast North America, Thomas E. Berres, David M. Stothers and David Mather; Predators of Culture: Jaguar Symbolism and Mesoamerican Elites, Nicolas J. Saunders; and Rohonas and Spotted Lions: The Historical and Cultural Occurrence of the Jaguar, Panthera onca, among the Native Tribes of the American Southwest, Steve Pavlik. There are probably many, many others.
Perhaps, as José Luis Aguilar Guajardo has suggested in personal communications, Sierra de Tamaulipas falls into an area in which jaguars were strongly revered. In a very simplistic summary of the above articles, cranial remains of bears in archaeological contexts in North America have been considered a sign of bear ceremonialism. They don’t appear in MacNeish’s Tamaulipas excavations. Jaguar hides were an element of Aztec royal clothing and one of the accoutrements used by Aztec shamans. A small fragment of possible jaguar hide was recovered from the Sierra Madre excavations in Tamaulipas.
Future excavations in the area will likely bring more evidence to bear on the ritual and symbolic practices of the people of Tamaulipas.
Resources:
Archaic Bear Tooth Pendants and other related artifacts
Donaldson, William S. and Stanley Wortner
1995 The Hind Site and the Glacial Kame Burial Complex in Ontario. Ontario Archaeology 59:5-95.
Bear Imagery and Ritual
Berres, Thomas E., David M. Strothers and David Mather
2004 Bear Imagery and Ritual in Northeast North America: An Update and Assessment of A. Irving Hallowell’s Work.Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 29(1):5-42.
Jaguar Imagery and Ritual
Pavlik, Steve
2003 Rohonas and Spotted Lions: The Historical and Cultural Occurrence of the Jaguar, Panthera onca, among the Native Tribes of the American Southwest. Wicazo Sa Review 18(1):157-175.
Saunders, J. Nicolas
1994 Predators of Culture: Jaguar Symbolism and Mesoamerican Elites. World Archaeology 26(1):104-117.
Recently, an unusual item was found while processing one of our adopted drawers. The Adopt-A-Drawer program lets donors support the full cataloging of artifacts housed at the Peabody. Every time a drawer is adopted we measure, weigh, photograph, and house the contents in archival storage. Beyond documentation and storage, adopted drawers represent a chance to dig deeper into the stories of the items held here at the Peabody.
Figure 1. Example of an unmodified turkey ulna (top) and flute made from ulna.
The item in question was one of two bone flutes stored in the adopted drawer (figure 2). According to our catalog, they were both from Pecos Pueblo, a site in New Mexico situated in the Upper Pecos Valley east of Santa Fe. One of the flutes is labeled with a number that indicates that it was previously uncataloged and found with material from Pecos. At some point in the past, it had become separated from its provenience information.
When comparing the two flutes they are similar in most ways. They are both made from bird bones with the ends removed to make a hollow tube (sound chamber) that is open on both ends. They also share the same configuration of holes. There is a larger hole near the proximal end of the bone and three smaller holes at regular intervals near the distal end of the bone.
Where they differ is that the uncataloged flute’s sound chamber is plugged at the proximal end by a dark material with a vitreous luster. It immediately brought to mind resin, an Indigenous adhesive material that I knew of but had never seen in a decade of working as an archaeologist. The position of the plug suggested that this instrument was played like a transverse flute, which was eye opening.
Figure 2. The two flutes with view of openings at proximal end.
I looked for information on other flutes from Pecos and fairly quickly came across an article authored by Richard W. Payne for Kiva, an archaeological journal published by the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society. Mr. Payne was a trained medical professional with a lifelong interest in Native American flute music. You can find more information about him here and a bibliography of his writings on native flute traditions here. He is considered one of the driving forces behind the rejuvenation of the Native American (or Plains) flute, which is its own fascinating story (Conlon 2002).
Payne’s article is fairly technical, being written from the perspective of a person with years of flute playing and experience with musical theory. Neither of these subjects are in my wheelhouse. On the first read, the most interesting points concerned his visual analysis of bone flutes from Puebloan sites. Among other suppositions, he suggests that the sound window shape can determine how the instrument was played (figure 3). Round holes could serve as the embouchure of a transverse flute or as tone holes of for an end blown flute. Notched holes could be played from either end. Triangle or square holes suggest ducted flutes. (Payne 1991)
Figure 3. Examples of sound windows with arrows to indicate wind direction and cross-section showing sound chamber. a: Transverse flute with plug. b: End blown flute, with wind blowing across the open end. c: Notched, making a hole with fipple edges to allow play from either end (my best guess). d: D-shaped window of a ducted flute with interior duct to direct air flow.
In discussing the bird bone flutes of Pecos, Payne notes that the site was occupied until the nineteenth century and that bone flutes from later contexts show evidence of European influence. Frustratingly, the claim isn’t supported with examples. Further, he mentions an article by Charles Peabody, the first director of the Peabody, wherein a flute from Pecos produced musical tones equivalent to a tabor pipe, again suggesting Western influence (Payne 1991).
The article by Charles Peabody, a talented flautist and ethnomusicologist, among other things, was written in 1917. In it, he describes asking Alfred Kidder for permission to experiment with a bone flute that was recovered while visiting Pecos during the 1916 season’s excavations. Permissions secured, those experimentations included inserting a plug of modeling clay in the proximal end of the flute. Prior to the insertion, the instrument played tones that were “excessively shrill.” After the insertion, the flute played several tones within the C sharp scale. A figure of the flute is included in Charles Peabody’s article (Peabody 1917).
When a comparison is made of the flute in Peabody’s article and the flute in question, it is clear that they are indeed one-and-the-same. The most likely scenario is that Charles Peabody acquired the flute at Pecos before it was cataloged. Eventually, it made its way back to the Peabody and was returned to the collection. By the time it was found with other materials from Pecos, all institutional knowledge of the item had been lost. Fortunately in this case, there was some record of its history.
With the story of the flute’s provenience resolved, there seems, to me, to be other questions left unanswered. These are the references to Western influence in both the musical tones and the flutes themselves suggested by Richard Payne and to a lesser degree, Charles Peabody. I’ll address those in a follow up blog.
References:
Conlon, Paula
2002 The Native American Flute: Convergence and Collaboration as Exemplified by R. Carlos Nakai. The World of Music 44(1): 61-7
Payne, Richard W.
1991 Bone Flutesof the Anasazi. Kiva 56(2): 165-177
Peabody, Charles
1917 A Prehistoric Wind-Instrument from Pecos. American Anthropologist n.s 19: 30-33
The arrival of COVID in March 2020 brought abrupt changes to the Peabody. Suddenly, we were working from home. We also canceled our volunteer program, and stopped hosting researchers, classes and work duty students. Gradually, a few staff started coming back in to the museum to continue (and finish!) the important collections inventory and rehousing project. To keep safe, we each had a floor to ourselves.
The library became my new workspace while we de-densified. It was a great location to inventory the very full drawers of material from the Mandan. Windows and a giant table, who could ask for anything more?
Vaccinations meant the return of our remaining staff and last summer we had volunteers and researchers back. This year’s fall term saw a return to nearly normal with classes and work duty students returning.
The return of students has been the single greatest change since we pulled back at the start of the pandemic. The building is periodically alive with the sounds of students again. Apparently, a place where students could gather and learn about archaeology were two of the conditions purportedly laid out by Robert S. Peabody when he founded the institution (source: Glory, Trouble, and Renaissance at the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology, page 4). In addition to our regular collections work, there is much more bustle as we pull items for classes and prepare for work duty students.
This year we have welcomed 16 work duty students back into the fold at the Peabody. They are currently engaged in several important projects, including revisiting items from the earliest stage of the inventory project. The students are adding a greater degree of detail to their descriptions, documenting additional notes and rehousing items per our updated standards. Others are learning how to write condition reports for the items pulled from collections for class lessons. Finally, work duty students have uploaded to our database nearly two-thousand slides from Copeland Marks’s travels that were digitized during our work-from-home phase.
Example of two drawers (left) before rehousing, (right) after rehousing.
We appreciate the help we receive from Andover students and are grateful that circumstances and planning have allowed them to return to us at the Peabody.
Work Duty students preparing to throw atlatl for a bit of end of term stress relief.
Over Thanksgiving break, I was catching up on some news and saw an article that caught my eye – Smithsonian African American Museum Launches Online Interactive Access. First, a headline like that will always catch my attention. Second, it stirred a memory of an email exchange that I had with a registrar from the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) back in July.
The Peabody Institute is proud to have a handful of items on loan to the NMAAHC to tell the story of Lucy Foster, a free Black woman who lived here in Andover from 1771-1845. Lucy’s story is part of the Slavery and Freedom exhibition. This loan has been active since 2019 and will continue until at least early 2023 (and may be extended!).
A few months ago, a registrar from the NMAAHC asked for permission to include the items on loan from the Peabody in their new digital initiative, the Searchable Museum. The Searchable Museum offers rich interactive, digital experiences based on the NMAAHC’s inaugural exhibitions, historical collections, narratives, and educational resources. The Slavery and Freedom exhibition was the first to be developed as a digital experience. I gladly granted permission to include Lucy Foster and her story.
While I was excited to see items from the Peabody as part of this incredible resource, I was also quickly drawn into the rest of the content. I especially enjoyed learning about the Point of Pines Slave Cabin. In 2013, a team from NMAAHC traveled to Edisto Island, South Carolina and began the meticulous process of dismantling and relocating a cabin that had been occupied by Black families from the 1850s until the 1980s. The cabin is a vehicle to tell the story of the people who lived there, the power of land ownership, the architecture of slavery, and modern housing discrimination.
The Searchable Museum is well organized and information is presented in clear terms – I strongly recommend that you all check it out!
We are pleased to announce that the Peabody has installed an interactive artwork by Jonny Yates (aka Jonny White Bull). Jonny is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and lives in McLaughlin, South Dakota. He is a talented jewelry maker, stylist, and chef, known for his own version of burger dogs, nachos with homemade chips, and other delicacies.
The piece, titled lalá, or grandfather, in the Lakota language, is a reference to Jonny’s ancestor Sitting Bull, who is depicted here. Jonny is the consummate “maker,” who loves creating carved and painted bone jewelry, drawings, and three-dimensional pieces made from cardboard, milk jugs, and other found materials.
Jonny invites everyone to spin his kinetic artwork and reflect on your own ancestors. You can find lalá in the Hornblower Gallery on the first floor of the Peabody.
CONTEMPORARY ART AT THE PEABODY
Jonny Yate’s piece joins a small but growing collection of contemporary Native art at the Peabody. When possible, the Peabody has purchased and commissioned artwork from Native artists with the support of donors and members of the Peabody Advisory Community. Artists with work in the collection include Dominique Toya, Maxine Toya, Bessie Yepa, Jeremy Frey, and Jason Garcia. These artists highlight some of the unique relationships that have developed between the Peabody and Native artists over the years. As an example, the Andover community has been fortunate to have several visits by Pueblo potters Dominique, Maxine, and Mia Toya over the years. During these visits, the Toyas share traditional pottery methods with students in Thayer Zaeder’s ceramics classes. They are very talented artists and quite passionate educators. You can read more about their most recent visit here.
Contemporary art in the Peabody Collection. From upper left: Jason Garcia, Jeremy Frey, Maxine Toya, Dominique Toya, and Bessie Yepa.
THE INSTALL
Hanging Jonny’s kinetic artwork presented a unique challenge; how could we make the piece available for a hands-on experience for students and visitors while keeping it safely installed. Research institutions, such as the Peabody, do not normally put collections on display, so we carefully considered our options. We chose to use cleats to secure the piece to the wall and a makeshift security clip to keep the piece from sliding out of the cleat. In place of a detailed narrative of the installation process, here are a series of photos of how we chose to approach the process. We hope you come by sometime and experience it for yourself.
lalá arrived hanging in a travel case
Access to the back was necessary for adding hanging hardware. The piece was safely removed before cutting a hole in the travel case, it was then re-hung.
Cleats were installed on the back top and bottom.
A receiving cleat was anchored to the drywall to secure the artwork.
Security clip (screw and washer) ensures that the artwork won’t slip off the receiving cleat while being spun.
The Peabody 
