The Peabody's major collections include artifacts and material from the Southwest, Northeast, Midwest, Mexico, Southeast, and the Arctic.

Peabody, an 1857 graduate of Phillips Academy, established the Museum as the repository for his collection of approximately 38,000 artifacts and as a place where students could become acquainted with the discipline of archaeology.

His excavations used an early form of the grid system and produced some of the first well-documented evidence of man in association with extinct fauna.

He undertook extensive regional surveys and excavations in the Arkansas River Valley, Northwest Georgia, and coastal Maine from 1907 to 1938.

Work at Etowah, Hopewell, the Cahokia Mounds, and “Red Paint” sites in Maine added about 200,000 objects and provided some of the most valuable early collections.

Inspired by questions raised at Pecos, Carl Guthe and Elsie Clews Parsons conducted ethnographic studies at Jemez and San Ildefonso Pueblos in the first use of analogy with the present as a tool in archaeological interpretation.

The Robert S. Peabody “Foundation for Archaeological Research” updated and revised cataloging, artifact storage systems, exhibits, and publications.

Johnson pioneered interdisciplinary paleoecological analysis for archaeological interpretation, applying it first to the Boylston Street Fish Weir in 1939.

During the 1950s Fred Johnson chaired the American Anthropological Association committee linking the needs of archaeologists with the expertise of Willard F. Libby to develop Carbon 14 dating for archaeological sites.

MacNeish's discoveries of early corn and the pre-ceramic sequence in Mexico provided crucial insight into plant and animal domestication and the beginnings of sedentary life in the New World.

The Museum curates the type collections published in the Tehuacan volumes and the personal papers, field notes, maps, photographs, and publications constituting the MacNeish library and archives.

[1] Today, under director Dr. Ryan Wheeler, the Peabody continues its primary role as a teaching museum and educational resource for Phillips Academy and its community.

The Robert S. Peabody Institute curates artifacts, archives, books, and images that pertain to indigenous cultures of the Americas, past and present.