Peabody Museum: Tales of Hopi Pottery: The Legacy of Historic Museum Collections

Free Public Lecture

Lea S. McChesney, Curator of Ethnology, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, The University of New Mexico

Harvard’s Peabody Museum houses an extraordinary collection of historic Hopi pottery (c. 1400–1900 CE), collected in the late nineteenth century by Thomas V. Keam, an Arizona trading post operator. Lea S. McChesney will discuss her work documenting and analyzing this collection, initiatives to facilitate access to heritage resources by contemporary Hopi practitioners, and recent shifts in the ways museums, researchers and Native communities collaborate to use and interpret legacy collections.