This brief history of the department of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania emphasizes three periods: a) what might be called its protohistory in the nineteenth century, closely associated with the founding of the University Museum, b) the beginnings of the department as a formal, named administrative entity early in the twentieth century, and c) the revival of the department after World War II, which effectively gave rise to the present department. This history stops in the early 1960s, when the department is clearly and fully established and begins to expand.

Anthropology makes its appearance at the University of Pennsylvania in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the field was a discipline but not yet a profession. In 1886, Daniel Brinton (an M.D. with ethnological interests) was appointed "Professor of Archaeology and Linguistics" in the newly created graduate school (then known as the "Department of Philosophy," since it granted Ph.D. degrees) which had a section called American Archaeology and Linguistics. He offered a class ("General Philology of American Languages," 2 hours a week) and instruction in several American languages ("Algonquin, Nahuatl, Maya, Kechua") and in "Methods of Study in Archaeology" and "General Outlines of American Archaeology"). We do not know, however, how active Brinton's teaching was nor how many students, if any at all, took these courses (in 1889-92, there were no majors or minors in his section). Brinton had also given lectures on these topics at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, where he held the title of Professor of Ethnology and Linguistics.

The Museum of Archaeology and Paleontology (which became the University Museum) was formally founded in 1889, on the initiative of William Pepper, Jr., M. D., University Provost (the equivalent, then, of University president). This was the time when the post-Civil War opulent elite of Philadelphia was selfconsciously creating the institutional trappings of a late nineteenth century cultured city (the year before, Philadelphia had been the host to the Centennial Exposition; over the preceding decades various learned societies were being founded at an accelerating pace; and, in 1872, the University of Pennsylvania, ambitious to grow, had moved from downtown to West Philadelphia to secure room for expansion). In the early 1880s, a privately financed American exploratory expedition to Mesopotamia was organized, inspired partly by the nationalistic wish not to be outdone by France and Britain in this new field of research. By the late 1880s, Pepper had involved the University in a new expedition (to Nippur ). The excavated objects were to become the property of the University which, in turn, promised to provide safe storage and exhibit space for them. This, in effect, resulted in the creation of a museum, which was first housed, in January 1890, on the third floor of College Hall and then, in December 1890, in the newly built University library (what is now the Furness building, housing the Fine Arts library). Finally, a separate new building (which is the older part of the present Museum) was erected in 1893-1989 (see Zettler 1992).

The new museum's focus was to be on the ancient civilizations of the Old World and on the collection of their artifacts - an endeavor that carried special appeal to the original sponsors of the project. But the focus quickly broadened, even if somewhat inadvertently, into archaeology and ethnology. This was mainly the result of Brinton's interests in promoting the new emerging science of anthropology as the study of the development of mankind as a whole and in all of its aspects. Brinton served briefly as the Museum's vice president but he lacked the connections to move it entirely in the direction of the new anthropology. He died in 1899, leaving it his extensive library that became the nucleus of the Museum library (which still houses the Brinton Collection).

The first anthropological curator of the Museum was an Americanist, Charles Abbott, M. D., named as Curator of American Collections in the late 1880s. Abbott was a student and an associate of F. W. Putnam of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, which was developing into an important center of anthropological research. The two other curators were the Rev. Herman V. Hilprecht, Curator of the Babylonian Collections, and the famous biologist Edward D. Cope, Curator of the Palaeontological Collections. In 1894, Abbott resigned, in disagreement over matters of Museum administrative authority and over the influence wielded by Mrs. Sara Yorke Stevenson, an amateur Egyptologist who had close ties to the Philadelphia and University establishment and served as Museum Secretary until 1905. When Brinton died in 1899, he was not replaced in his professorial capacity -- an indication of the University's relative indifference to the academic side of the new science of anthropology, even while it was willing to maintain the Museum as a public institution.

The first active Curator, also bearing the additional title of Director (with no clear indication of its functions) was Stuart Culin (1892-1903). He ran into problems similar to those that drove out Abbott; his rather openly expressed dissatisfaction with Mrs. Stevenson's influence finally led to his departure (in fact, dismissal) to become Director of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (later, the Brooklyn Museum). Culin was succeeded by G. B. Gordon (1903-1927), trained at Harvard in classics and Native American ethnology, who was officially named Director. Gordon had a relatively free hand with Mrs. Stevenson's departure in 1905, and his plans were also in harmony with the vision of the Museum's founders -- a vision that emphasized "ancient civilizations" and that continued to have important supporters on the Museum Board and in the University. He organized some of the early large-scale excavations abroad for which the Museum became so well-known. Gordon also saw the Museum as a stage for the academic promotion of anthropology. With the authorization of the Museum board, Gordon taught, for four hours a week, some courses in anthropology and archaeology. By 1911, a Department of Anthropology was in existence at the Museum; it offered eight courses and taught over a hundred graduate and undergraduate students, awarded three Harrison fellowships, and had two PhD candidates. At the same time Gordon was apparently opposed to the formation of a regular academic department within the College -- an indication of his view that there was an inherent conflict between the missions of museums and of academic anthropology.

In 1908, Edward Sapir, who was to become the great linguist and cultural anthropologist, came from Berkeley on a temporary curatorial appointment (and two years later departed for Ottawa, seeking a more research-oriented environment, focused more on publication and less on concrete artifacts). In 1911, Sapir's place at the Museum was taken by Frank Speck (who had also come in 1908) -- an Americanist ethnologist, specializing in the Northeast, with some claim to Native American descent, and the first Penn anthropology PhD (1909). Speck was given the formal title of assistant professor. He and Gordon were the two instructors in anthropology, Speck receiving $700 a year from the University and $800 for his curatorial work in the Museum. However, Speck's singular temperament was quite incompatible with the rather formal and stiff Gordon. Their relations deteriorated very seriously; and in 1913 Speck left the Museum to be appointed to the College and to become chairman of a formally constituted department of anthropology in the College with its associated graduate group.

The relations between Speck and Gordon remained antagonistic over the following years. There are many anecdotes about their feuding; how many of them are factually true (as they seem to be in spirit) is the kind of problem that collectors of oral tradition face. The relationship is dealt with in Winegrad's (1993) history of the Museum and Darnell's (1970) early history of the department. A typical anecdote that has had word-of-mouth currency over the years may be retailed here in the interests of historic preservation. After Speck had, practically speaking, detached himself from the Museum, he nevertheless continued to occupy an office just above the Museum Director's office. Gordon, in his campaign to dislodge Speck, had put a padlock on the bathroom on Speck's floor, depriving Speck of its use. Speck solved the problem by opening and using his window; the dribbling on the director's window below quickly resulted in a key being conveyed to Speck. Apocryphal or not, the story is consonant with Speck's personality as it appears in numerous other stories. There was also feuding over the use of classroom space in the Museum by Speck, and over Gordon's sequestering of some of Speck's manuscripts. As Darnell suggests, the quarrels had some repercussions in the profession, outside of Penn, for about a decade.

This early phase of the formally constituted department is marked by the presence of several distinguished anthropologists (besides the earlier presence of Sapir), and some of them are now remembered as among the pioneers of American anthropology. Most of them served briefly and sometimes intermittently, with appointments in the department or the Museum or both. Thus, we find at Penn Wilson D. Wallis, in various positions between 1911 and 1915, an Oxford-trained ethnologist and a 1915 Penn PhD, who later founded a major department at Minnesota; D. Sutherland Davidson, a 1928 Penn PhD and an archaeologist and ethnologist specializing in Australia, who held various appointments between 1925 and 1944; Heinrich Wieschhoff, 1942-1947, an Africanist trained in Germany, who later became an aide to Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the United Nations, and died with him in the Congo in 1961; and A. Irving Hallowell, the Americanist cultural anthropologist trained under Speck and Boas, a pioneer in psychological anthropology, and one of the earlier Penn Ph.D.'s (1924), who was at the Museum and the department in various positions between 1924 and 1942 (and who returned to Penn in 1948 at the time of the department's revival). The overall configuration of the department conformed to the emerging personality of American anthropology, as it was then being shaped, notably by Franz Boas and his followers - a holistic configuration currently expressed in the term "four-fields."

Between 1927 and 1929, the Museum was under an Acting Director, Jane M. McHugh, who had been the Museum's secretary; and then under Director Horace H. Jayne until 1940. The bad blood between Speck and Gordon had disconnected anthropology from the Museum and made the role of anthropology at Penn problematic (during World War I, all instructors in anthropology were dropped). In the contest between department and museum, the more ornamental function of the Museum and its Philadelphia connections worked in its favor. George Vaillant, a Mesoamericanist scholar, was named Museum Director in 1941. At the same time, by 1942, the University had decided to let the department lapse upon the anticipated retirement of Frank Speck in 1950, and a preliminary dismantling of the department began (thus, Hallowell's departure to Northwestern). But Vaillant's suicide in 1945 ushered in new arrangements. It was decided to revitalize the Museum and indeed to develop it as a research institution - - a task given to Froelich Rainey, a Yale-trained archaeologist who had done work in Alaska and the Caribbean and was with the U.S. State Department during the war. Rainey became Museum Director in 1947 (and guided it until his retirement in 1977, presiding over its growth into a major research center). Rainey convinced the University that the Museum could not be intellectually viable without an association with a department of anthropology. This led to the department's revival: Loren C. Eiseley, a paleontologist and a 1937 Penn Ph.D. teaching at Oberlin, was brought in as chairman in 1948. Hallowell was invited back from Northwestern, and Ward H. Goodenough, a freshly minted PhD trained at Yale under Sapir and Murdock, came in 1949 from Wisconsin. Thus, a full-scale department emerged, with a full-time teaching faculty of four (it must be remembered that at the time there were in the U.S. only about a half-dozen graduate departments of anthropology, each normally with less than a half-dozen faculty appointees). Speck continued until his death in 1950(the year of his projected retirement); whereupon his courses were handed over to advanced graduate students -- J. Louis Giddings, an associate of Rainey's specializing in Alaskan archaeology, and Anthony F. C. Wallace, a cultural anthropologist, a student of Speck's and Hallowell's, whose interests included cultural anthropology, Northeastern ethnohistory, and psychology. And the department's offerings were further strengthened by the secondary appointment of Wilton M. Krogman, a Chicago-trained Professor of Physical Anthropology in the Graduate School of Medicine.

Rainey and Eiseley agreed that a close relationship between Museum and department was in the interests of both. Eventually, the university approved a plan whereby every Museum curator (including the director) would normally receive an academic appointment in one of the appropriate departments and would accrue tenure in it (at the time, the relevant departments were those of Anthropology, Classics, and Oriental Studies, but in time they were followed by others, such as American Civilization and Art History). The curators were to teach at least one course a year and provide research opportunities and guidance to graduate students. As a matter of reciprocity, department members were given appointments as curators in the Museum. What this relationship implied in practice was not always clear. The Museum supplied at least the bulk of the department's strength in archaeology, while appointments in the Museum ranged from courtesy appointments to active involvement in Museum activities. The pragmatic meaning of the relationship fluctuated, occasionally raising misunderstandings. It may be noted that until the 1960s, curators had a very pronounced primary identification with the Museum, where their salaries were budgeted and which sponsored their research activities; their participation in the department was essentially peripheral and narrowly restricted to teaching (the flavor of these arrangements come through, for example, in Coon's and Rainey's memoirs).

At the time when the arrangement was begun (1949), it added to the anthropology department's faculty Froelich Rainey, Linton Sattherthwaite (a 1943 Mesoamericanist Penn PhD), and Carlton Coon (a Harvard physical anthropologist and Middle Eastern ethnologist). [However, J. Alden Mason, a distinguished Andean archaeologist and a 1911 Berkeley Ph.D., who became a curator in 1926 never entered into the new arrangement and never took up an appointment in the anthropology department]. In the 1950s, Robert Dyson (a Middle Eastern archaeologist from Harvard), William Coe (a 1958 Penn Ph.D. and a Mesoamericanist archaeologist), and Alfred Kidder II (a 1937 Harvard PhD and Andean archaeologist) were added as curators with appointments in the department.

Rainey initiated at the Museum a period of extended and ambitious field archaeological research, much of it in the Museum's "ancient civilizations" tradition (such as the Tikal project directed by Coe and the Hansanlu project by Dyson); the research (or "expeditions" as they were often, somewhat archaically, referred to) also generated many Ph.D. dissertations in the department. Although Giddings left for Brown in 1956, to establish there an anthropology program and a museum patterned on the Penn model, the Penn department in the late 1950s was at the threshold of a period of expansion both numerical and in terms of its offerings - a process that went in tandem with the unprecedented expansion and diversification of anthropology as a field. The expansion in the 1960s was guided by Anthony Wallace; a 1950 Penn PhD who had held a secondary appointment in the late 1950s, Wallace came in as chairman in 1961 -- Eiseley having become University Provost in 1959, with Ward Goodenough replacing him as acting chairman until 1961. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, other new faculty members were appointed. Ruben Reina (trained at North Carolina under Honigman) brought a cultural contribution to the existing Mesoamerican and South American archaeological strengths. Robbins Burling (a Harvard Social Relations Ph.D.) bolstered cultural anthropology and linguistics and brought Southeast Asia (and later moved to Michigan ). Paul Friedrich (from Harvard) enhanced cultural anthropology and linguistics (and then moved to Chicago And Bernard Wailes, from Cambridge, initiated in 1961 Penn's distinctive program in European archaeology and archaeological methods.

The expansion continued through the 1960s and 1970s, with some significant senior appointments: for example, Davenport reinforced the department's commitment to Oceania and social organization, initiated by Goodenough; Dell Hymes brought in sociolinguistics; and the sociologist Erving Goffman brought his own brand of anthropologically-influenced social psychology. And new junior appointments gave new strengths in Africa, North and South America, the Middle East, and, within physical anthropology, in paleontology, primatology, and medical anthropology. Since that time, the department has reflected the dynamics the field: as professional mobility increased, so did the turnover (in personnel as well as specialties) and the sheer number of appointment -- permanent, transient, and adjunct. The department also reflected the administrative dynamics of the University; the dismantling of some departments enriched anthropology with faculty transfers from American Civilization and Folklore. And the number of PhD students also sky-rocketed.

A final note about the physical side of the department's history. In the 1940s and 1950s, the department's primary appointees occupied office space in Bennett Hall and did their teaching on the central campus, while curators were housed in offices in the museum and did their teaching there. In the late 1950s, as the University embarked on a building program and various departments were choosing their new quarters, the department decided to get closer to its museum colleagues; it moved into temporary and makeshift quarters in the museum (in the western wing that opens upon the enclosed garden and is now occupied by the exhibitions workshop). In the 1960s, when the museum began to make plans to build the New Wing (Rainey's final visible legacy), Wallace, as department chairman, was instrumental in securing an NSF grant to provide space in it for the department. And in 1970, the department moved into its present commodious quarters.

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Some References:

There are a few sources available - not always reliable in every detail - many of which, however, deal with the Museum and only tangentially with the department.

There are two (below) more or less "official" histories of the Museum:

Madeira , Percy C., Jr. 1964

Men in Search of Man: The First Seventy-Five Years of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania . Philadelphia : Univ.of Pennsylvania Press.

Winegrad, Dilys Pegler 1993

Through Time, Across Continents: A Hundred Years of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University Museum Philadelphia : University Museum , University of Pennsylvania .

Kuklick, Bruce 1996

Puritans in Babylon : The Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life, 1880-1930. Princeton University Press. [This book deals with Middle Eastern archaeology, but, given the University Museum 's role in it, the book has some important data on the Museum].

Coon's and Rainey's autobiographies focus almost entirely on their work at the Museum, and they convey (by omission, really) their perception of the distant relationship between museum and department:

Coon, Carleton S. 1981

Adventures and Discoveries: The Autobiography of Carleton S. Coon. Englewood Heights , NJ : Prentice-Hall.

Rainey, Froelich G. 1992

Reflections of a Digger: Fifty Years of World Archaeology. Philadelphia : University Museum .

Finally, closer home, the following deserve attention:

Darnell, Regna 1988

Daniel Garrison Brinton: the "Fearless Critic" of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Dept.of Anthropology, Univ.of Penna.

Darnell, Regna 1970

The emergence of academic anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. J.of the Hist. of the Behavioral Sciences VI(1):80-92.

Mason, J. Alden 1964

Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Bulletin of the Philadelphia Anthropological Society.

Blankenship, Roy (ed.) 1991

The Life and Times of Frank G. Speck. Philadelphia: Dept.of Anthropology, Univ. of Penna.

Zettler, Richard L. 1992

Excavations at Nippur, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University Museum. In Maria deJong Ellis (ed.), Nippur at the Centennial: Papers Read at the 35e Rencontre assyriologique internationale, 1988. Philadelphia: University Museum, pp. 325-336.

[Contributors: Text and data: Ward H. Goodenough, William H. Davenport, Igor Kopytoff, Richard L. Zettler, Alessandro Pezzati. Final Text by Igor Kopytoff].