With Opening the Museum, the Peabody Museum Press launches a new series of Occasional Papers. These periodic publications present essays, short research papers, and works-in-progress relevant to contemporary museum issues and museum history. In Volume I, Peabody Museum director Rubie Watson presents three snapshots in time of the museum and its changing nature: in 1877, 1928, and 2001. The oldest museum of anthropology in the Americas, the Peabody is dedicated to collecting, researching, housing, displaying, and interpreting the artifacts and material culture of societies around the world. Its history, as ably interpreted by Wilson, has reflected the changing nature not only of museums but of the study of anthropology over time.

Rubie Watson is Curator of Comparative Ethnology in the Harvard University Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

Read More by Rubie Watson:

• Painted by a Distant Hand: Mimbres Pottery of the American Southwest