The Peabody Museum at Harvard University, founded in 1866, is the oldest institution in the western hemisphere devoted solely to archaeology and ethnology. As a result of a commitment to field research and many generous bequests, the museum now houses one of the most exhaustive systematic records of material culture in the United States of America. There are over fifteen million objects in the collection, half of which represent North American material encompassing Paleoindian cultures through the present. About half a million photographic images from around the world documenting the development of the different branches of anthropology are curated by the Department of Photographic Archives.
Media range from daguerreotype to microfiche.
This guide is an overview of a selection of the North American photographic collections with information noted regarding the museum's related collections of artifacts and paper archives. Although the approach is now outmoded, the images produced at that time became historical records that enjoined anthropologists to reexamine ethical issues and change the direction of the discipline. Archaeological research sponsored by the Peabody Museum began in the late 1800s when Frederic Ward Putnam, the third director of the museum, organized the excavation of burial mounds in the Ohio River Valley. In addition to the factual data that the photographic archives contain, the collections also reflect more subjective findings of ethnologists. A shift in research concerns can be traced from an overt objectification of cultures in early studies to a search for elements of human interrelatedness in more recent work.