 Suppose Kevin Costner built a ball field and nobody came?
That’s the situation Andover’s Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology was facing in the mid-1990s. The facility, although it had slipped into a dormant period for eight years after the departure of respected director Richard “Scotty” MacNeish in 1982, had a noble heritage. A premier institution for the study of Native American history, it had been founded in 1901 by archaeologist Robert Peabody, PA Class of 1857. Its collection had been augmented by Alfred V. Kidder, Warren K. Moorehead (a friend to Red Cloud) and other legendary practitioners. It had been involved in pioneering work in carbon dating, boasted a fine library collection and some 500,000 artifacts dating from 12,500 years ago to the present day, and drew scholarly researchers from all over the world. It had good relationships with Native American communities, notably the Jemez/Pecos people of New Mexico, the Mi’kmaqs of Nova Scotia and the Mashpee and Nipmuc Indians of Massachusetts. Among museums affected by the 1990 federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which set complex requirements for returning to native peoples certain categories of sacred artifacts, it was deemed a national model for compliance. Under the leadership of Director James Bradley, who had arrived in 1990, it had launched an ambitious program of exhibitions and fund raising meant to put the century-old institution back on the map and into the black.
It didn’t happen. For one reason, the Peabody’s remote location and highly specialized collection undermined its ambitions as a potential travel destination—to return to the Kevin Costner metaphor, they didn’t come. For another, an economic downturn during the latter half of the 1990s found many museums, apart from some of the largest, best-celebrated and best-endowed art museums, starving for philanthropic dollars; even once-popular tourist meccas like the New England Aquarium and Old Sturbridge Village were undergoing widely publicized belt-tightenings.
By the turn of the century, the institution was at the brink of closure, its finances unstable, its mission ambiguous. Bradley and five of his seven staff members left to pursue other activities. An assessment committee was formed charged with reporting back in 2002 with a plan for the Peabody’s future. Instead, the committee proposed maintaining limited operations through June 2004 while another planning committee took a longer, more careful look at the issues.
Should the Peabody move elsewhere? Should it cease to be, and divest its collection? What about the historic trust placed in the academy? What of the school’s fiduciary responsibility? What would become of the Peabody building if the museum closed? No question was off limits.
In January 2004, the second planning committee, co-chaired by Charter Trustee Sandy Urie ’70 and Dean of Studies Vincent Avery and including members of the academy, Native American and scholarly communities, reported back. Its recommendations, quickly accepted by the Trustees of Phillips Academy, were a source of delight to the PA community. Instead of closing the doors on the venerable museum, the trustees voted Jan. 21 to open them wider—but not to a larger public. “We believe that the Peabody Museum will be best served if it reorients its activities to focus on the education of Phillips Academy students and faculty,” said the committee’s report, which went on to prescribe that the museum collaborate with teachers of science, history, art, English, life issues and other disciplines to create and strengthen collection-based curricular units.
The trustees also voted to name Interim Director Malinda Blustain, who had joined the Peabody staff in 1992 as collections manager, to the position of director. To emphasize the academic mission, she will report directly to incoming Dean of Studies Margarita Curtis, whose new job encompasses responsibility for curriculum.
Blustain is an experienced curator who holds a B.A. degree from the University of Florida and an M.A. degree from the University of Kentucky, both in anthropology with a concentration in archaeology. She is charged with helping mastermind a new role for the Peabody as a resource for Andover teachers seeking to shape meaningful, hands-on learning experiences for their students.
The idea of making the Peabody more student-centered is not totally new. Over the past few years, individual students and faculty members have been finding their way into the museum to work on special projects. For example, students in microbiology classes have used artifacts from the collection in projects on subjects that range from comparison of modern and ancient dog DNA to searching for known disease vectors in samples from a human hair apron found in the Southwest. Dozens of students have performed collections management tasks as their required work duty. History instructor Marcelle Doheny drew on the Peabody’s holdings to support students in a course she created called Kill the Indian, Save the Man, which covers U.S. expansion and Indian policy in the 19th century. Blustain can envision a day when artifacts and documents from the Peabody provide the bases for collaborative studies linking science, history, English, art and other disciplines.
“The Peabody,” Blustain says, “is all about people: what makes people people, the history of people, perhaps the future of people. When presented in the right way, this material can be very appealing to students, even helping to influence their world view. The Peabody is fortunate in having the opportunity to redefine ourselves in this way, and I believe we have a lot to offer.”
While its focus in the years ahead will be on adding exciting new dimensions to an Andover education, the “new” Peabody, as Blustain calls it, will not turn its back on its traditional constituencies. It will remain open to scholars, museum professionals and the interested public by prior arrangement and will continue working in close collaboration with members of the Native American community.
Other aspects of the committee’s report provided for:
- a modest fund-raising campaign to strengthen the museum’s financial base;
- reaffirmation of “the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology” as the institution’s name;
- retention of the Friends of the Peabody support group; and
- formation of a committee comprised of PA faculty members to work on educational programming issues and a separate committee of representatives from the Native American, museum and scholarly communities, as well as Andover faculty and trustees, to address collections oversight.
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