History

Pat Courtney Gold, Sally bag, "Honor the 1805 Wasco Weaver." PM 2003.24.1 Pat Courtney Gold, Wasco-Wishram, grew up on the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon and became a professional mathematician. Inspired in part by the Peabody's "Sally Bag," possibly...

Transcript The 2022 Gordon R. Willey Lecture The story of Maya culture as a once-great civilization that built towering pyramids in the jungles of Central America was developed and popularized by national governments, anthropologists, and archaeologists...

The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago was the first American fair to feature anthropology. The new discipline had its own building, supervised by Frederic Putnam, then director of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum.It competed, however, with...

What does it mean to be a maker, artist, or artisan in the twenty-first century? In her new book, Almost Lost Arts (Chronicle Books, 2019), Emily Freidenrich explores the work of twenty artisans from points worldwide who practice their craft using...

In 1938–1939, Harvard University funded an expedition to Australia aimed at understanding how colonization had affected Indigenous peoples and their physiology, and at informing government policy as it shifted from segregation to assimilation. Led by...

Despite ideals of scientific and scholarly objectivity, both Egyptologists and non-specialists have often projected their own racial anxieties onto ancient Egypt. Recurrent attempts to prove that the ancient Egyptians were white or black, for example...