With more than two million artifacts, Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology is the oldest museum of its kind in the U.S.

01:00 AM EST on Wednesday, January 11, 2006

By KEN MAGUIRE
Associated Press

CAMBRIDGE -- It's not quite undiscovered, but the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology perhaps doesn't get its due.

"We're a little overlooked," said Pamela Gerardi, the Harvard University museum's director of public relations. "We've got a world-class collection. We want people to know it."

The nearly 140-year-old museum is the oldest of its kind in the U.S., with more than two million artifacts representing thousands of years of human experience.

Its collections include ceramic arts of the little-known Moche culture of ancient Peru, to a grizzly bear claw necklace that is among the only seven surviving American Indian objects collected by explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

The Lewis and Clark exhibit, open through December 2006, spotlights a hidden goal of the 1803-06 expedition. President Jefferson sent the explorers to find a Northwest Passage to the Pacific, with a side mission of scientific observation.

But judging by the objects they brought back, curators say, Jefferson also sought to control the Indians through trade. Among the items are peace pipes complete with woodpecker bills tied backward -- a sign of peace.

Goodwill gestures to the U.S. government, they believed, would pay off.

Indian communities eventually ended up on reservations, and a separate exhibit -- which is nearing its end -- highlights some of their lobbying efforts in Washington. Official portraits of Indian leaders taken in the U.S. capital between 1850 and 1870 were published at that time with no captions or context. Curators say this fueled public perception that the Indians were "noble savages."

The exhibit, "Breaking the Silence," uses words from the leaders themselves to describe the Washington missions, many of which were to lobby for better conditions on the reservations.

"They were issued just as photographs, with no other information," Gerardi said. "There was no background. They were divorced from their context. The curators wanted to give back the context."

Elementary school teacher Judy Lazrus says the Hall of the North American Indian is her favorite section. She brings her first- and second-graders there once a year.

"Every time I go into the Native American hall I am just awed by the beautiful things," said Lazrus, who teaches at Cambridge's Graham and Parks School. "It feels like a very spiritual place to be. It touches my heart."

The children, who are studying American Indian cultures, got a hands-on demonstration from a guide about building shelter when he showed how a whale rib could be used to help build a house, she said.

"The kids were very involved," she said. "It gave them an appreciation for what an anthropologist does, and what artifacts are and how you learn from them."

Founded in 1866 by George Peabody, the museum originally housed archaeological finds of the Merrimack Valley.

Its reach has expanded quite a bit. A collection of ceramic arts from the Moche culture, which existed before the Inca, used imagery that is easily identifiable today, curators say. "Stirrup pots" form a centerpiece to the exhibit. They depict faces of animals, men, women, and children.

"The faces are distinctly different on all of them," said Gerardi, the museum's first public relations director, hired three years ago. "They really are portraits of actual people."

There's also a large collection of 19th century Mesoamerican casts of hieroglyphic information on remote jungle monuments.

"That's how the world learned about these cultures -- through casts," Gerardi said.

As people traveled more, however, the casts became less vital. That is, until the monuments deteriorated through acid rain, or were vandalized or stolen.

"These casts preserved information that's no longer available on the originals," she said. "The originals are so badly damaged that the casts are more valuable, from a scholarly point of view."

A Peabody Museum researcher, William Saturno, recently uncovered a Mayan mural in Guatemala dating to 100 B.C. that shows through hieroglyphic script "the story of creation, the mythology of kingship and the divine right of a king," according to a news release from National Geographic, a sponsor of the dig.

"You're certainly not going to find collections like this anywhere else ... of this scale a quality," Gerardi said.