For the ancients, legendary Valhalla lay somewhere in the great beyond; but for one group of scholars, at least--the University's anthropologists--Valhalla might more appropriately lie right here in Cambridge, inside the walls of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

Located on distant Divinity Avenue, close to several of Harvard's other great museums, Peabody may seem a remote outpost of the University. To the visitors who venture behind it drab red-brick exterior, however, the Museum offers an abundance of unusual exhibits. Seemingly endless display halls, spread over five floors, testify to the size of Peabody's world-wide anthropological collections. In fact, to discover all the Museum's displays is a feat of exploration in itself.

For the layman in the field, many of the Museum's exhibits verge upon the spectacular. Twenty-five foot totem poles dwarf the onlooker in the hall of Indian ethnology; in the Bowditch Hall of Middle American culture, huge casts of Mayan, statuary tower two floors in height. On Peabody's top floor, the skull of Mt. Carmel Man, the only Paleolithic man on exhibit in the United States, sits staring moodily at his bones in case across the hall. Not far away stands the Museum's ample collection of shrunken and mummified human beads, calculated to surprise even the most hardened curiosity-seeker.

Both the Peabody Museum is more than a mere repository for everything from African fertility symbols to embalmed chimpanzees. The display cases which line its walls are only the outward aspect of the Museum's role in the University and in the study of anthropology. The Museum is far loss purely antiquarian and far more complex than it-may appear to most of its casual Sunday visitors. Like the figurative iceberg, mot of Peabody lies below the surface.

Yale Grad's Idea

The original expectations of Peabody's founders have long since been exceeded; they appear modest purposes indeed, set against the multifarious activities of the Museum today. Curiously enough he initial idea for the foundation of the institution, one of the first of its kind in America came in 1805 from a Yale graduate, Othniel Charles Marsh. The science of anthropology was then in its relative infancy and Marsh, later to become America's first professor of paleontology, was little more than a novice in the field. But while digging one day in an ancient Indian mound in Ohio, Marsh was struck by the realization that the rapid settlement of the American countryside was resulting in the destruction of many of the relics of the ancient Indian tribes. As the young science of anthropology increased in prominence, much of the material for anthropological study seemed actually in danger of disappearing.

That night Marsh wrote to his uncle, George Peabody, a leading Boston financier, urging him to establish a museum. The chief object of the proposed institution was to be the collection of such ancient Indian remains as could still be obtained in America. Peabody had already expressed his intention of making a large gift to Harvard, and quickly approved Marsh's plan for the creation of general museum of archaeology and ethnology. Peabody's original gift, for the establishment of the Museum, made in 1866, was in three parts; a grant of $60,000 for a building, $45,000 for the purchasing needs of the institution, and a $45,000 endowment for the Peabody Professorship of Archaeology and Ethnology, a post now held by John Otis Brew, Director of the Museum and newly elected President of the American Anthropological Association.

World-Wide Importance

In the first few years of its history, the Museum's small collections were housed in an anatomical laboratory in Boylston Hall. Then, for a time, they occupied a gallery in the old anatomical Museum. In 1876, construction finally began on the present building, and the collections were moved there two years later. Almost immediately after its foundation, the Museum began to acquire archaeological specimens from sites abroad. Any idea of restricting the Museum's functions merely to the preservation of American collections was soon abandoned. As the twentieth century dawned, anthropology as a field of study began to grow enormously. And the Peabody Museum grew with it into an anthropological center of world-wide importance.

Peabody today is dedicated to the furtherance of all the many aspects of anthropological research and scholarship. The activities of the University's Department of Anthropology, of course, centre about the Museum--it is an invaluable aid both to teaching and to student research. In fact, most of the Department's faculty members perform a dual function--they hold appointments as curators of the various departments of the Museum as well as professorships of anthropology. The Museum itself, at present, has three endowed professorial chairs.

Primarily for Study

As director Brew points out, the Museum's collections and exhibits must be prepared primarily for the use of the student of anthropology and the scholar engaged in serious research. In this sense, the Museum's role as a showplace for the general public is distinctly secondary one. As a centre for teaching and scholarship, Peabody's first obligation must always be to the University.

Many of Peabody's exhibits are therefore of a sufficiently high technical nature to warm the heart of the most demanding practicing anthropologist. One of the Museum's prize displays, for instance, is its room devoted entirely ot sequences of prehistoric artifacts--row on row of stone implements, demonstrating Stone Age man's first feeble attempts at tool-making. In the so-called "bone laboratory," some 15,000 human skeletal remains repose in carefully classified cases for the edification of the Univeristy's physical anthropologists. The physical anthropology section of the Museum has the distinction of possessing the largest collection of chimpanzee skulls on the North American continent--over 300 skulls, several years. Another Museum collection, considerably less accessible to the general public consists of some 60,000 Army photographs illustrating types of body structure.

Constant Exchanges

Peabody's research activities are not confined to the Museum building proper, however. The Museum engages in extensive projects in coopreation with similar institutions all over the world. A constant exchange of specimens and inter-library leans take place between Peabody and organizations abroad. In particular, the Museum library, with well over 60,000 items, conducts a widespread exchange of research material with other museums and university departments of anthropology--Peabody publications even breach the Iron Curtain.