Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

Diné ideas about harmful supernatural practice developed independently of that Christian tradition and carried their own categories, methods, and explanations for how one person might deliberately injure another.

So one of the most detailed later studies of those beliefs came from the anthropologist Clyde Cluckholm, whose Navajo Witchcraft was published by Harvard's Peabody Museum in 1944 after years of work with Diné informants.

Cluckone stressed that there was no single practice that could be neatly translated into the English word witchcraft, and he used English categories such as witchery, sorcery, wizardry, and frenzy witchcraft to separate different kinds of harmful supernatural activity described to him.

Those labels were Cluckone's analytical terms rather than proof that every Diné person in 1878 divided the subject in exactly the same way.

It's by a fantastic poet and writer called George S. McHarg.

who's from New York and who worked for decades about Golden Press and Doubleday before moving to Massachusetts in her later life to edit history and archaeology reports for the Michaels Institute for Conservation Archaeology at the Peabody Museum in Harvard.

So shout out, George S.

Seriously, this book is like pretty good.

Where do these connect? The anthropology I chose was not physical anthropology.

I did take one class over at Harvard at the Peabody Museum, but most of it was structural anthropology.

And structural anthropology, for anybody who's listening, uh, was at the time, at any rate, was a lot about Claude Lévi-Strauss, and he thinks in terms of opposites, right? Life versus death, gender, male, female.

What are those? They're binaries.

There was a famous incident in the department.

Jane had one of her disappearing spells, an unexplained absence that worried her classmates and drew whispered speculation in the hallways of the Peabody Museum.

When she finally resurfaced, she strolled into the Peabody Museum smoking room and announced calmly that the rumors of her death had been greatly exaggerated.

It was the kind of entrance that became legend in a small, tight-knit department where everyone knew each other's business.

Her academic specialty was Near Eastern archaeology, specifically the Neolithic period, roughly 5,000 to 6,000 years before the Common Era.

Agriculture replaced foraging.

Civilization as we would eventually understand it was being invented.

Jane worked at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, one of the oldest anthropology museums in the world.

She is funding hospital wards and university buildings.

The notes here say she actually funded the very first fellowship for a woman at Harvard's Peabody Museum.

Right.

Mary Thaw was a woman of immense capability operating in this highly restrictive era.

So what's actually documented? There were indeed excavations in the Serpent Mound area in the late 1800s.

The Peabody Museum at Harvard funded work there.

Archaeologists described burials, grave goods, and the structure of the mound.

They mapped post holes, noted hearths, catalogued pottery and stone tools.