Hello Friends

Welcome to the Harvard Peabody Museum Collections Division blog! What’s a Collections Division you ask? At the Peabody, it encompasses the departments of Collections Management and Access, Archives, Registration, Conservation, and Collections Technologies. The Division is comprised of over thirty staff members, some of whom are pictured above.

Founded in 1866, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard is one of the oldest anthropology museums in the world. Focusing on the study of ancient and contemporary peoples and cultures around the globe, we are stewards for:

• 1.25 million items
• over 500,000 historic photos
• an extensive paper archives

That’s a lot of collections to care for! This makes for busy days spent rehousing, photographing, archiving, conserving, lending, researching, and cataloging (phew!) We’ll show you a bit of what facilitating the care, use, and ethical stewardship of our collections actually entails. But we’ll skip the boring stuff (I know, I know, you’re asking…how could it EVER be boring?? You so get us.) Check back in soon. In the meantime, let’s be Instagram friends!