Tozzer Library began as the Peabody Museum Library in 1866 with a gift of $150,000 from George Peabody, to be apportioned to a building fund, a professor fund, and a collections fund, the latter to be used to acquire and preserve both objects and books. That Mr. Peabody envisioned an anthropology library may be considered prescient, since as Peabody Museum Director J.O. Brew wrote in 1966, “The Library did not begin so impressively as did the [object] collections and research program. This is understandable in a new field which, in 1866, was not even established as a respectable academic subject. There were few books in anthropology, and the people who were to write them were busily at work in the field or, for the most part, still unborn.” (One Hundred Years of Anthropology, edited and with an introduction by J.O. Brew, 1968)
Now, one hundred and forty years after George Peabody funded his museum and library, Tozzer Library has reached a milestone with the addition of our 250,000th volume. To honor the Peabody Museum’s original focus on New World archaeology and ethnology, we celebrate this occasion with the purchase of a rare early-18th century work on the various peoples of the Americas. In what today we might call a textbook the anonymous author presents to his German-speaking readers detailed descriptions of the cultures and customs of Native Americans, supplemented with fanciful woodcut drawings.
Monni Adams, Peabody Museum
The Raw & the Cooked
The author recognizes the cognitive complexities in myths created by people who do not express their thoughts in writing.
Philip K. Bock, PhD 1963
Elements of Social Organization
…Contains clearly stated ideas that, in obscure, post-modern jargon, are posing [today] as new and original. Firth discussed what is now described as "practice" and "agency" in ways I find lacking the clarity that he brought to the terms.
The Folk Culture of Yucatan
…Contains clearly stated ideas that, in obscure, post-modern jargon, are posing [today] as new and original. Redfield proposed processes that accompanied urbanization (globalization).
Peter Bogucki, PhD 1981
The Early Mesoamerican Village
This book not only presented me with a fresh way of looking at the archaeological materials I was excavating in Poland but also provided an example of sensible, non-polemic solid scholarship that was a welcome respite from the theoretical and methodological disputes of the day which in hindsight did not amount to much. For a graduate student, it was crucial to realize that one could make an impact on the field without having to be disagreeable and contentious, and Flannery and his students who contributed to this volume were a wonderful example.
John Borneman, PhD 1989
Law as Process: An Anthropological Approach
Moore's book opened up a whole new set of questions about the exploration of "law" in social contexts, about the use of history in anthropology, about the understanding of public meanings, and about the authority of law, its limits and possibilities.
The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays
Geertz's perspective on meaning opened up, for me, several questions with which I am still preoccupied, such as the possibilities of translation of meaning across cultural contexts, and the necessity of self-critical reflection--personal and national--in order to proceed with analysis.
Ian W. Brown, BA 1973
Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940-1947
I used this book in the first paper that I wrote in an introductory archaeology course at Harvard. I felt a connection at the time with the volume because Phillips and I were born on the same day (August 11) and the book was released in the year I was born (1951). Little did I realize that this volume, when combined with the guidance of my professors at Harvard (Stephen Williams and Jeffrey Brain), would lead me into a career of archaeology in the Mississippi Valley. Putting personal experience aside, the PFG '51 treatise is arguably the most influential volume of the twentieth century for Southeastern archaeologists. It is magnificent example of the many contributions made by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology Papers series.
Robbins Burling, PhD 1958
Anthropology
No book in anthropology has ever been more important to me than Anthropology by Alfred Kroeber. There was nothing exotic about it, and it is not the sort of thing that one puts in a book exhibit, but it is the book that persuaded me to study anthro and we used to say (early 50's) that if you knew everything in Kroeber you could pass your General Exam. A remarkable fact about the field of anthropology is that today's graduate students have never heard of Kroeber, let alone his big green book. That says something about fads and fashions in anthropology.
Ben Campbell, PhD 1990
Balancing on an Alp: Ecological Change and Continuity in a Swiss Mountain Community
This was the first anthropology book I read that combined and qualitative ethnographic and historical data with quantitative demographic and ecological data to produce an anthropological understanding of the way one community made its place in nature.
George Collier, PhD 1968
Europe and the People Without History
Wolf's book establishes a framework for interpreting and reinterpreting societies and cultures we know ethnographically and ethnohistorically within a broader economic and political framework of fundamental forces shaping the globe during the period of expanding influence of European colonialism and industrial growth.
George L. Cowgill, PhD 1963
Mirror for Man: the Relation of Anthropology to Modern Life
In terms of personal importance to me, I’d give first rank to Kluckhohn’s Mirror for Man.
Irv DeVore, Department of Anthropology
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
To many, Charles Darwin has had more influence than any other person in history on how we understand the living world and our place in it. His Origin of Species, together with The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), provided a framework for understanding the history, proliferation, and modification over time of all living things. Darwin's influence on physical anthropology was immediate (for example, T. H. Huxley), and eventually came to be the foundation for all theory in biological anthropology and paleontology. His influence on the social sciences was no less profound, but mostly unfortunate. The early social theorists (e.g., L. H. Morgan, Karl Marx) completely misunderstood Darwinian principles, but even so cloaked their personal philosophies under the Darwin mantle. Sadly, many of these misunderstandings persist to this day. Only in the closing decades of the twentieth century have new techniques and discoveries in genetics, brain neurology, and behavioral biology begun to provide the first solid building blocks for a synthesis of biology with human evolution and behavior.
Peter Ellison, Department of Anthropology
Primate Behavior: Field Studies of Monkeys and Apes
It was important to me personally in demonstrating how close humans are to other primates, not just anatomically, but behaviorally. It was important to the discipline as a whole as the foundation stone of what has become one of its largest and most vibrant subfields. For a decade or more after its publication virtually every student of introductory anthropology in the country either read from this book or viewed one of DeVore's films of baboon behavior.
I pick this book, though I could easily have picked Man the Hunter (1969), edited by Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, another seminal volume that virtually launched the subfield of hunter-gatherer studies by underscoring the critical importance of this form of subsistence to human cultural and evolutionary history.
Geoff Emberling, BA 1987
Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology
Hodder and his "post-processual" archaeology was far from popular when I was a graduate student at University of Michigan, but he undeniably began a series of debates that have shaped archaeology over the past two decades. Much of my own research has revolved around questions of meaning, symbols, and interpretation. Hodder raised these issues and discussed them at a time when few other archaeologists were considering them.
Barbara W. Fash, Peabody Museum
Biologia Centrali-Americana: Contributions to the Knowledge of the Flora and Fauna of Mexico and Central America, Vols I-V, Archaeology
These illustrated and textually explicit volumes of the first scientific excavations in Central America are classics. Maudslay carefully recorded the archaeology while precociously setting the standard for recording monuments with his meticulous photographs and the technically accurate drawings by artists Annie Hunter and Edwin Lambert. Their dedication and perfection were inspirational to me when I first encountered the achievements of the ancient Maya, as they will continue to be to future artists and archaeologists.
William L. Fash, Department of Anthropology
The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization
This short but ambitious volume made the occasionally arcane subjects of Maya archaeology, hieroglyphic writing, and ethnology accessible to one and all. It was a thoroughgoing synthesis of a variety of data sets, nicely blending historical and anthropological perspectives. During my extensive reading on Mesoamerican archaeology and art in High School, this volume piqued my interest both in the Maya and the ways in which ethnohistory and ethnography could inform archaeologists about ancient lifeways and worldviews.
Gregory Finnegan, Tozzer Library
Facing Mount Kenya: Tthe Tribal Life of the Gikuyu
Malinowski’s legendary London seminar in the 1930’s included students from all over the world—Meyer Fortes from South Africa and Kenyatta from Kenya among them. Kenyatta’s classic functionalist ethnography came out of the seminar, before he returned to Kenya and, after independence, became its president. The study has the strengths, and the now-more-emphasized weaknesses, of functionalism, with change hard to imagine if all facets support all others. But read after the colonial-officer and missionary ethnographies that preceded it, Kenyatta’s book is a breath of fresh air. And it’s among the first anthropological studies written by a ‘native,’ one in which the political and nationalist dimensions of ethnography aren’t hidden. While I was inclining toward anthropology, encountering Kenyatta when I was an undergraduate certainly made me an Africanist.
Rowan Flad, Department of Anthropology
The Archaeology of Ancient China
The fourth edition of Chang’s seminal synthesis has remained the unsurpassable English-language reference for all students of Chinese archaeology. I was introduced to it and to the earlier versions of the book as a graduate student and continue to use it. Chang was able to not only bring together vast amounts of information in this volume but also present a convincing argument for how societies developed in China based on the available data. The Fourth Edition furthermore demonstrates that Chang was willing to change his view as more data became available.
Eugene Giles, BA 1955, PhD 1966
Up From the Ape
This book, the text in my introductory physical anthropology course taught by its author, started me down the path to becoming a biological anthropologist. The late Harvard paleontologist, George Gaylord Simpson, called the book "sound" but "flippant and personal." So it was, and indeed, that was its allure. The style appealed to undergraduates and even to the more general public; the soundness made it, in its day, along with A. L. Kroeber's Anthropology, a text anthropology graduate students needed to know well to survive.
Irene Good, Peabody Museum
Cloth and Human Experience
I see this important volume as a landmark in cross-cultural study of material culture. It was the first comprehensive look at cloth and how its production interrelates material, economic, social and symbolic aspects of society. Taking the approach of these ethnographic and historical studies to the corpus of archaeological textiles was a logical next step for me.
Gloria Greis, PhD 1995
Excavations at Star Carr: An Early Mesolithic Site at Seamer Near Scarborough, Yorkshire
The first systematic effort to integrate the data of productive economy into the total workings of prehistoric cultures in Europe was not made until the 1950s, and is primarily associated with the work of Grahame Clark. European archaeology lagged well behind American archaeology in this regard. In Star Carr, Clark put to work the principals he had outlined two years earlier in his great work Prehistoric Europe: the Economic Basis (1952), to produce a detailed cultural and economic/ ecological analysis of the Mesolithic site. Although additional excavation and modern analytical techniques have modified some of Clark's conclusions, his pioneering work was the springboard for European economic archaeology in the subsequent decades.
Norman Hammond, Boston University and Peabody Museum
Biologia Centrali-Americana: Contributions to the Knowledge of the Flora and Fauna of Mexico and Central America, Vols I-V, Archaeology
…Provided the database to initiate the serious study of Maya hieroglyphic writing, and now records material lost by erosion or destruction.
Julia Hendon, PhD 1987
The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies
This short essay has engaged anthropologists such as Raymond Firth, Claude Levi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins, Maurice Godelier, Annette Weiner, Sergei Kan, and David Graeber (to name a few) in a fascinating and productive dialogue about the role of exchange in the reproduction of society. Mauss and his interlocutors have played a significant role in the development of my ideas about the nature of social relations in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societies.
Sarah B. Hrdy, PhD 1975
Origine de l’Homme et des Sociétés
I did not learn of the existence of this work, by Darwin’s French translator who was also the first woman to be elected to the Societé d’Anthropologie in Paris, until 1997. In that same year I read Royer’s suppressed manuscript entitled “Sur la natalité” in which she made points similar to ones I made in my book The Woman that Never Evolved (1981, 1999). I was working on a section of Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species (1999) about (largely ignored) women who early on wrote about and critiqued Darwin’s ideas about females and the role of sexual selection – remarkably prescient critiques that could have spared evolutionary theorists a lot of problems that were not corrected until 150 years later. I would have loved to know about Royer’s work sooner.
Robert Jurmain, PhD 1975
The Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution: An Introduction to the Study of Paleoanthropology
W.E. Le Gros Clark was perhaps the first modern paleoanthropologist, and in this short, brilliant book he establishes the basic framework still followed by most researchers. He also relates the history of discoveries in a way that captures the excitement of the field and, in so doing, stimulated more than one of us to go to graduate school.
Alice Kehoe, PhD 1964
Dersu the Trapper
It was an eye-opener, a beautiful account of this Siberian “noble savage,” his worldview and ethics. Besides its beautiful ethnographic portrait, it clued me in to circumboreal culture. The book used to be near the door between outer and inner rooms in the basement of Peabody Library, at about three feet high, so it caught my eye to pull it out and read it.
Jane Kelley, PhD 1966
Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structures
…The single most influential book I read in graduate school. I think that Leach's book was generally important to the entire field.
T.R. Kidder, PhD 1988
Archaeological Survey in the Lower Yazoo Basin, Mississippi, 1949-1955
Thirty-six years after its publication this work still stands as the foundation of archaeological scholarship for a vast region of eastern North America. The volume is perhaps one of the most elegantly written works in archaeology and combined innovative methods, sound field work, and extensive research to create a monumental synthesis. It is a guide to the archaeology of a large region as well as a model for how to report archaeological research. As fitting testimony to its value, after three plus decades of further research, the central conclusions of this work still stand largely unchanged.
Arthur Kleinman, Department of Anthropology
Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture: An Exploration of the Borderland between Anthropology, Medicine and Psychiatry
…The most influential book in the building of the new medical anthropology in the 1980s and early 1990s. It since has been superseded by much more recent books by Paul Farmer, Margaret Lock, Lawrence Cohen, Adriana Petryna, and João Biehl among others. But for its time it set out the central conceptual and research questions for educating an entire generation of medical anthropologists, the generation that is now leading the field.”
C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, Department of Anthropology
Man Makes Himself
In this book Childe defined the agenda for much of the archaeology as practices in the 20th century. In coining the terms “The Neolithic Revolution” and “The Urban Revolution” he attempted to define the causal processes that brought about the origins of agriculture and the emergence of urban, literature civilizations. His focus on climatic and environmental factors, demographic change, changes in material technology, trade, and migratory movements he attempted to provide explanations to the processes involved in cultural evolution. This wide-sweeping synthesis, written with scholarly concern for a general audience, summarized his classic works The Dawn of European Civilization (1925, 6th ed. 1957) and The Most Ancient Near East: The Oriental Prelude to European Prehistory (1928, 4th ed 1952).
Louise Lamphere, PhD 1968
Patterns of Culture
Patterns of Culture was the first anthropology book I read, and it inspired me to become a cultural anthropologist. Benedict's poetic evocation of non-Western cultures invited me into a discipline that valued cultural difference and called for a vision of humanity that celebrated the broad spectrum of human behavior and the varied repertoire of cultures across the world. Even though the Zuni lived in New Mexico, only about 400 miles from my hometown, at the time I knew little about their complex ceremonial life and philosophy. I was even more unfamiliar with the Kwakiutl and the Dobu, the two other peoples Benedict describes in the book. The literary quality of Benedict's descriptions and the poetic images she called forth gave each culture a complexity and a positive value that opened up other ways of thinking very different from my own experience.
Steven LeBlanc, Peabody Museum
War Before Civilization
…Made a generation rethink much of archaeology and human history.
Steven LeBlanc, Peabody Museum
Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective
…Provides the key organizing principle of human societies. Primitive Social Organization is the most important synthesis in all of anthropology.
Richard Leventhal, BA 1974, PhD 1979
Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán
This is a translation of one of the most important manuscripts in Maya studies. But it is clearly more than just a translation - it includes over 1,100 footnotes and references. The notes, in fact, completely dwarf the original manuscript and provide a critical resource for Maya scholars. This also provides us with a clear snap-shot of both Landa and the state of Maya studies in 1941.
Daniel Lieberman, Department of Anthropology
Cranial Variation in Man: a Study by Multivariate Analysis of Patterns of Difference Among Recent Human Populations
Although a complex book written for specialists, Cranial Variation in Man is a masterpiece of research and an intellectual landmark. In terms of methods, the book succinctly and clearly outlines the innovative multivariate statistical techniques that Howells developed in order to quantify variation in skull shape. These methods -- which included the separation of size and shape and the use of principal components analysis -- transformed paleoanthropology. The monograph is also important because of its comprehensive nature and its profound conclusions. The monograph analyzes 70 variables from 17 populations (each sampled by more than 50 skulls) that derive from diverse corners of the world. Howells' analyses showed that most human cranial variation exists within rather than between human populations, and that only a few major aspects of variation distinguish the skulls of people from different parts of the world. And despite its difficult and highly quantitative subject matter, Howells wrote with clarity, elegance and a dry sense of humor.
Diana Loren, Peabody Museum
In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life
It was during my first archaeological field experience on an early 18th century site in Philadelphia that I read Deetz's classic volume on historical archaeology. To this day, I continue to be inspired by his descriptions of everyday people and the material culture with which they constructed their lives; especially as some of the material culture that Deetz studied is a part of the Peabody Museum collections. For over 30 years, Deetz was a leading force in methodological and theoretical advances in historical archaeology and almost thirty years after its publication, In Small Things Forgotten is as influential as it was when first published in the 1970s.
Maija M. Lutz (Tozzer Library)
The Central Eskimo
This book, which was based on field explorations Boas conducted in the Cumberland Sound area of Baffin Island, was one of the first scientific monographs to be published on the Inuit. It was this work, with its musical transcriptions and detailed descriptions of festivals and ceremonies, that piqued my interest in Inuit music and drew me to Baffin Island ninety years after Boas was there to see what this music was all about and how it had changed over time.
Joyce Marcus, PhD 1974
Coclé, an Archaeological Study of Central Panama
This brilliant analysis of the Coclé, Panama, material has never been approached or superseded by archaeologists who came long after Samuel K. Lothrop. It influenced all work on chiefdoms and all work in Panama.
Joyce Marcus, PhD 1974
Inscriptions of Petén
This work led more archaeologists to study Maya hieroglyphs and shed light on Maya political organization than any other set of volumes; it was an ambitious and highly influential set of volumes and still is! Sylvanus Morley and Frances Morley were pioneers.
Castle McLaughlin, Peabody Museum
The Sun Dance Religion: Power for the Powerless
This ground-breaking comparative analysis of a Plains Indian dance ceremony introduced political economic interpretations into Native American studies and helped launch anthropology's enduring engagement with the concept of "power." Jorgensen's application of dependency theory to explain the "neocolonial" status of Indian reservations to the larger United States and the impact of that relationship on culture has influenced generations of scholars in many disciplines, myself included.
Richard H. Meadow, Department of Anthropology (PhD 1986)
New Perspectives in Archeology
Published the year I entered graduate school, the articles in this book comprise some of the foundational studies of 'Processual' or the 'New' Archaeology. They and other contributions by the various authors, Lewis Binford in particular, helped to create a sea change in the way that American archaeologists came to investigate and conceptualize the past, especially for the prehistoric and protohistoric periods. For the same reasons, an equally important work for British archaeologists was David Clarke's tome Analytical Archaeology (1968, revised by Bob Chapman in 1978), which appeared in the same year. While today some approaches espoused in these volumes seem naive and some results even wrong, their emphases on the importance of framing significant questions about past societies and on carrying out systematic and often multidisciplinary research to try to answer those questions represent enduring contributions.
Richard Moench, PhD 1963
The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture
Teaching a graduate course in the history of theory, I of course welcomed Harris's book when it first appeared, and discovered I disagreed with its argument. Yet I was fascinated with his return to a neo-Kantian dualism, insisting on the difference in methodologies between science and history (or culture). Harris's evaluation of all the early figures of anthropology was formulaic (science requires diachronic, materialist, nomothetic approach, anthropology ought to be science, ergo good anthropology is nomothetic, diachronic, materialist, bad anthropology is idiographic, synchronic, idealist...sorry, Ruth Benedict!). This set me thinking about all the dualisms in social science and wondering if in fact a choice was mandated or alternatively whether the "opposing" pairs were complementary. I began to choose my texts to reflect this question (Bourdieu & objective/subjective; Sahlins & structure/history, etc. etc.). Teaching theory got to be more fun.
Dolores Newton, PhD 1972
Coleções e expedições vigiadas: os etnólogos no Conselho de Fiscalização das Expedições Artísticas e Científicas no Brasil
This particular work came from research for a master’s thesis from a young man who was able to grasp his own world firmly and vividly enough to explain things that I as an outsider was able to experience as an “Aha!” moment.
Bernard Perley, PhD 2002
“The Eliot Bible,”
In 1658 John Eliot completed his translation of the Bible into the Masschuset language. It would be the first bible printed in North America, and is rightly treasured as a valuable piece of American cultural patrimony. However, the Eliot Bible must also be seen as an icon of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s treatment of the native peoples of New England. A tool for delivering the Christian faith to the Massachuset people, John Eliot’s evangelical work may have saved their souls but did not save the people, and today the Bible remains as one of the few pieces of tangible evidence of the Masschusets. Fortunately, the Bible preserved their language, but as an Indian and an anthropologist working to revitalize American Indian languages I regard Bibles written in dead languages with ambiguous esteem.
David Pilbeam, Department of Anthropology
Mankind in the Making: the Story of Human Evolution
Howells was a writer of superb prose. Of his popular books, Mankind in the Making is particularly important because it probably influenced more embryonic paleoanthropologists and primatologists half a century ago than any other book.
David Plath, PhD 1962
Mirror for Man: the Relation of Anthropology to Modern Life
If I were to pick one book that most shaped my decision to become an anthropologist, this is it. On active duty in the Far East during the Korean War, inundated by Cold War propaganda from all sides, I wanted a way to find a vision of the human potential not crimped by the petty parochial preferences of nation, creed, race or ideology. Stationed in Japan, I wanted a way to understand why Japanese and Americans had been blindsided into a pointless war in the Pacific. Mirror for Man didn't offer answers, but it offered the exciting possibility that answers can be found.
Jeffrey Quilter, Peabody Museum
The Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization
The book set the course for a great amount of archaeological research in Peru for the next three decades.
Jeffrey Quilter, Peabody Museum
New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America
Lionel Wafer was a member of an English buccaneer raiding party which, in 1680-1681, crossed Isthmus of Panama to attack a Spanish settlement there. Wounded in an accident, Wafer was left to fend for himself after the raiders' attack failed. After many months he successfully returned to the Caribbean coast, meeting native peoples along the way, and was eventually rescued by an English ship. His record of his travels is a rare, early account of native life in southern Central America and very valuable for understanding chiefdom societies there.
Jeremy A. Sabloff, PhD, 1969
Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Viru Valley, Peru
This highly influential monograph successfully showed how the study of human settlement patterns could provide key insights into the social, economic, and political organization of past societies and had an immense impact on the conduct of archaeology in the second half of the 20th century.
Susan Seymour, PhD 1971
The People of Alor: A Socio-Psychological Study of an East Asian Island
I was first exposed to this book as an undergraduate seeking information about different societies' concepts of human nature for a paper I was writing. I came across The People of Alor and was fascinated by, among other things, Du Bois' descriptions of infant feeding practices and the inferences she made between these and adult attitudes towards food and hunger. Such psychocultural analyses stimulated me to pursue a career in anthropology. What I did not know at the time was that The People of Alor was a groundbreaking work in anthropology that helped to establish psychological anthropology as an important subdiscipline in the field. Du Bois, frustrated by the limitations of the kind of cultural analysis she was exposed to in graduate school, sought a new paradigm for anthropology--one that probed how culture gets internalized and, in turn, motivates individuals' behavior. That new paradigm has become the driving force for most of my professional work in anthropology.
John J. Shea, PhD 1991
In Pursuit of the Past: Decoding the Archaeological Record
Binford is the principal American exponent of processual archaeology, an explicitly scientific, hypothesis-testing approach to studying this human past. In this book Binford reviewed current debates about the major issues in prehistoric archaeology as informed by middle-range research, -studying modern-day human behavioral variability in order to create more credible and testable models of past human behavior. Binford also told how his initial questions about Neanderthal technology and subsistence led him to conduct ethnographic research among living hunter-gatherers. I read this book during the summer before starting graduate school, and it profoundly influenced the course of my studies. From it, I learned the important lesson that answering the really interesting questions in archaeology requires critical self-consciousness about method, -constantly asking oneself how you know what you think you know. It should be required reading for anyone seriously considering a career in archaeology.
Gair Tourtellot, PhD 1983
Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (1841)
What grabbed the attention of the world for Latin American archaeology was John L. Stephens’ exotic Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan. Written before degrees were offered in anthropology, it is almost ethnographic in its acute descriptions of Maya Indians and their conditions just before a great Maya rebellion, and contains discoveries and descriptions of pristine Maya ruins stunningly illustrated with engravings by Frederick L. Catherwood. As well, it is a marvelous document for the study of Romantic travel and art, colonialist attitudes, cultural condescension, gender bias, ethnic intimidations, economic oppression, hegemonic impulses, and good writing. In any case, it led to Edward H. Thompson’s account of exploring the eerie Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza that first chilled and thrilled me.
Hartmut Tschauner, PhD 2001
Ecology, Meaning and Religion
I found this book utterly fascinating because it lays out an approach to religion and symbolism that is at the same time materialist and anything but simplistic and reductionist. This is even more important in today's intellectual climate than it was at the time the essays were written. The book demonstrates that the seeming gulf between "scientific" approaches popular in the 70s and today's post-modern, often expressly anti-scientific approaches may be more apparent than real, more a matter of different language games than of substantive differences.
Jason Ur, Department of Anthropology
Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates
Landscape archaeology of the New World has Harvard's own Gordon Willey, while the Old World has Bob Adams. Like Willey, starting in the 1950's Adams began to research ancient society (in his case, ancient Mesopotamia) from a regional perspective by mapping the changing organization of settlement through time. His innovation was to also reconstruct further elements of ancient landscapes such as the canals and rivers that sustained early cities. Heartland of Cities is the culmination of his survey work, and has set the paradigm within which all of his successors work.
Gary Urton, Department of Anthropology
Dialectical Societies: The Ge and Bororo of Central Brazil
This was the first in-depth, comparative look at social organization within the very complex societies of the central Amazon basin, and the most visible result of the Harvard-Brazil project, headed by Prof. Maybury-Lewis during the 1970s and 80s. These were the same societies (or at least their mythological traditions) that were the focus of Levi-Strauss's studies for his four-volume structural study of Amazonian mythologies, called (collectively) Mythologiques (1964-1971).
James L. Watson, Department of Anthropology
Agricultural Involution: the Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia
This book was instrumental in establishing the field of cultural ecology in American anthropology. It appeared during my second year in graduate school at Berkeley; Geertz's analysis of Indonesian agriculture inspired my own research (conducted in 1969) on rice ecosystems in the Hong Kong region. Geertz has gone on to do many other things since the appearance of Agricultural Involution but, in my view, this book has stood the test of time. Anyone interested in agriculture, ecology, and political economy would be well advised to read it.
Stephen Williams, Department of Anthropology (Emeritus)
Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940-1947
This “classic,” published by the Peabody Museum in 1951and printed by the Harvard University Printing Office, was the first volume of the long-term archaeological program called the "Lower Mississippi Survey" which I headed from 1958 to 2001. That program continues under the direction of one of my PhD's Tristram Kidder, the grandson of the well-known archaeologist Alfred V. Kidder, a Harvard grad and PhD who ran the Carnegie's Middle American Archaeological Program and also had a post in the Peabody as well.
John P. Wilson, PhD 1969
Final Report of Investigations among the Indians of the Southwestern United States, Carried Out Mainly in the Years from 1880-1885
The Final Report in my opinion is, if perhaps not exactly a capstone, a monumental tribute to the intellectual power of the author in creating a synthesis of historical, archival, archaeological, and ethnological materials that interpreted the late prehistory, protohistory and Spanish-Colonial history of the American Southwest in an enduring manner, such that it is not only very readable but valuable even today.
Nur Yalman, Department of Anthropology
Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structures
A brilliant work by a superb field worker who put together an analysis of systems that appear to work like clock-work in their interconnections between kinship systems, politics, culture and language. A unique work which influenced many generations of anthropologists.
Nur Yalman, Department of Anthropology
The Savage Mind
One of the most creative of modern anthropologists who succeeded in destroying the very concept of "the primitives" by demonstrating the intricate and creative genius of cultures that are usually dismissed as being "simple" peoples. The work paved the way to a most fertile field of research on categories of the mind and the creative elements in myth, ritual and religion.
Nur Yalman, Department of Anthropology
The Todas
A brilliant book by a brilliant psychiatrist anthropologist who was instrumental in both in-depth fieldwork on a fascinating group in South India, and also in bringing together the two disciplines which are so crucial to each other. Rivers was an early pioneer in this field which has been so enriched by our Medical Anthropology group.
Marc Zender, Peabody Museum
The Hieroglyphic Stairway, Ruins of Copan: Report on Explorations by the Museum
This key book represents an important landmark in the study of Copan's famous hieroglyphic stairway, the longest and largest Precolumbian historical text in the New World, portions of which still grace the third floor landing of the Peabody Museum today. The timing also seems particularly apt, since the sub-stairway buildings are currently under excavation by William R. Fash and his student, Molly Fierer-Donaldson, and the stairway itself is the topic of this year's Peabody Museum Weekend of the Americas (Oct. 13 - 15, 2006).