Neil Evans
D ATE LINE AND O VER
Inset: Peabody workduty student Apsara Iyer ’12 and museum director Malinda Blustain bury time capsules near the building’s entrance.
High Demand for Peabody’s Resources Spurs Renovation When amateur archaeologist Robert Singleton Peabody, Class of 1857, founded the country’s first (and only) archaeological museum on a secondary school campus in 1901, little could he have imagined the types of changes that would be part of its largest renovation in more than a century.
“The renovation also gives us additional classroom and meeting space, as well as the repository for our extensive collection of books and journals,” said Peabody Director Malinda Blustain, who oversaw the project. To commemorate the renovation, the Peabody’s 30 work-duty students, under the direction of assistant collections manager Marla Taylor, buried two time capsules on the museum grounds in October, preserving for future generations a period of time for the museum marked by a dichotomous surge in demand for its resources (500,000 artifacts, 25,000 photographs, thousands of documents, and a 6,000-volume library) in an infrastructure hobbled by its own antiquity. Stuffed with objects, photographs, and documents, the canisters’ contents create a portrait of the museum, the Academy, and the world at large in 2010, including some cheeky (a BP gift card) and some earnest (an Operation Iraqi Freedom lapel pin). On top of papers detailing campus statistics and administrative and student rosters are stuffed a Lady Gaga T-shirt, a deflated World Cup soccer ball, opposing news editorials on the proposed “Ground Zero Mosque,” a Tea Party Gadsden flag, and Head of School Barbara Landis Chase’s BlueCard. —Amy Morris
12
Andover | Winter 2011
Yuto Watanabe
Longtime Peabody supporter Marshall Cloyd ’58 funded the six-month project, completed in mid-January. Construction included the additions of a second stairway, a fully accessible firstfloor bathroom, an entrance ramp, and retrofits that brought the museum into compliance with modern building codes. The compliance allows patrons to once again utilize the second-floor library, which, due to issues of egress and access, had been shuttered from any meaningful purpose for decades.
Peabody Names Award for Longtime Volunteer The R.S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology honored its longest-serving volunteer in October with a Davis Hall dinner reception attended by friends and supporters. Museum director Malinda Blustain presented Eugene Winter of Lowell, Mass., an inaugural award named in his honor. Blustain says the Eugene Winter Award will be presented in the future to those volunteers who exhibit the dedication and longevity exemplified by its namesake. Over the course of his 60 years of volunteering at the museum, Winter, 82, is credited with safeguarding the Peabody’s vast collection of Native American artifacts, most notably in the 1980s during a time when the museum was starkly understaffed. In 1990, he was named the museum’s honorary curator, a position he holds to this day.