A sign outside of the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology, which is set to re-open this Spring
Classroom visits to the Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology (Peabody) are expected to resume this spring. Following the completion of the first portion of renovations to the Peabody, staff are now working on recataloging and moving the Peabody’s collection into its newly updated spaces.
The renovations, initially planned to be completed by October 2023 but pushed back due to minor complications, were mainly focused on the basement, including creating a better shelving space for the collection. Climate control and fire suppression systems were also established to create safer housing for the collection, and an elevator was added to increase accessibility to all floors. The number of classroom spaces in the institute has also been increased.
Marla Taylor, Curator of Collections at the Peabody, described the process of relocating the collection. She emphasized that the renovations gave Peabody staff an opportunity to rethink the organization of parts of the collection and relocate materials as needed.
“In order to make that renovation work happen, we had to relocate everything out of the basement into other areas of the building, and now we’re in the process of putting it down there [again]. It’s quite the task because this is a once in a hundred years opportunity to reorganize the collection intellectually and physically, and… giv[ing] us a wonderful opportunity to rethink the way we care for and house the materials in the building,” said Taylor.
As the five-year renovation nears its end, Ryan Wheeler, Director and Chair of Archaeology at the Peabody, described the amount of work that has gone towards taking care of the collection to ensure the preservation of the remnants of history for future generations.
“We need to take better care of the collections. We need to address the climate, the storage. I’m sure the people before me recognized all of that as well. It has been a really long time to get to the point. It involved cataloging the entire collection, rehousing the entire collection. That was a five-year project. We needed five years to get ready for it. We were working on this for a really long time, so it’s really gratifying to see it actually happen,” said Wheeler.
Wheeler elaborated on how the renovations will also allow the Peabody to accommodate more classes at Andover. He highlighted how the Peabody has been able to help many students despite not being physically open to classes.
“By really moving all the collections down into the basement, it will actually open up more spaces in the rest of the building for classrooms and program spaces. We have a lot of demand for those classes, even being closed: we probably had over 400 students that we served in the Fall and something close to 300 in Winter Term so far. That’s a lot, even not being able to have people in here,” said Wheeler.
Marcelle Doheny, Instructor in History and Social Science, shared the benefits of having direct classroom involvement with the Peabody. She touched on how students benefit from discovering history by interacting with artifacts, as opposed to solely studying written documents.
“For students to actually look at objects and try to figure out what they are, what they were used for, is really fun… [In] History 100, for example, we do a lot about trade and how trade connects to cultures. There’s a really good unit you can do on trade over at the Peabody that looks at trade inside the Americas through artifacts. So there’s ways to expand a topic that you might do traditionally in the classroom with written sources, and you can include artifacts to broaden that knowledge,” said Doheny.
After spending his Lower Year work duty working with various collections, Anthony Woo ’24 was so drawn to the Peabody that he continued as a student volunteer in his Upper and Senior years. Woo remarked on the unique opportunities that having an institution of archeology on campus provides for both Andover students and the outside community.
“It’s great that we get to work with [and] look at objects and learn about curatorial practices. I think that is something that is really unique to our school because we have this institution here which does archeology. I don’t think you can really get many other opportunities [like this] outside of the Peabody and outside of our school, so that’s something which is really unique to us… History and studying material cultures and looking at objects really changes how you think about things,” said Woo.
