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The anthropological holdings of The Field Museum began with the Columbian Exposition. The first public appeal for extensive anthropological exhibits at the Exposition was made by the celebrated American anthropologist Frederic Ward Putnam, Curator of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, in a letter to the Chicago Tribune in May 31, 1890. Putnam passionately argued that the Exposition and future Museum would be a "perfect exhibition of the past and present peoples of America and thus make an important contribution to science . . . which will be the first bringing together on a grand scale of representatives of the peoples who were living on the continent when it was discovered by Columbus." Putnam has been described by some as the "father" of American archaeology, and as the great "professionalizer" of the discipline. Putnam was not only Curator at the Peabody and in charge of the anthropology building and exhibit at the Exposition, but he helped found the Departments of Anthropology at Berkeley, the American Museum of Natural History, and ultimately the Anthropology Department at The Field Museum. Putnam was chief of the Department of Ethnology at the Exposition and appointed Franz Boas, then a German immigrant and professor at Clark University, as his chief assistant and head of the section on physical anthropology. He also appointed one of his students at Harvard, George Dorsey, as head of the archaeology section. The Exposition was the stimulus for a great period of collections building. The most important scientific collections where gathered through the efforts of about 100 scholars in the field under the direction of Dorsey, Putnam and Boas between 1891 and 1892. Important collections were also purchased from around the world. The Columbian Exposition indeed fulfilled Putnam's vision of a grand exposition of objects from the Americas and beyond, illustrating the archaeology, ethnology and physical anthropology of the world's cultures. On November 28, 1891, Putnam urged the Commercial Club of Chicago to take advantage of the opportunity afforded by the Exposition to build a great natural history museum in the city. Through the private donation of Marshall Field and the efforts of Edward E. Ayer, the museum was born and the Trustess of the Exposition assembled the collections and presented them to the new Museum. Franz Boaz was appointed Curator of Anthropology and began his work on the permanent exhibits for the opening of the Museum in June of 1894. At the time of the 1894 opening, the anthropology collections consisted of approximately 50,000 specimens. The majority of these collections were from the Americas, consistent with the theme of the Columbian Exposition. Unfortunately, Boas, who was to become the intellectual founder of American anthropology as we know it today, resigned from the Museum under pressure from Harlow Higinbotham, the President of the Exposition and Trustee of the new museum. Boas returned to New York as an assistant Curator at the American Museum of Natural History, and eventually was instrumental in founding the Anthropology Department at Columbia University. Boas was succeeded by William H. Holmes, an archaeologist from the Smithsonian Institution. In this period Holmes conducted a major expedition with Charles F. Millspaugh, Curator of Botany, to Mexico. Holmes resigned late in 1896 to return to the Smithsonian. His successor at Field Museum was George Dorsey, who had been appointed Assistant Curator the year before. Dorsey held the post until 1915. During his incumbency, the anthropology staff was expanded and a very active field program was carried out in North America and Oceania. The Department developed a carefully articulated methodology for the collection of objects. Between 1908 and World War I, Fay-Cooper Cole, William Jones and Albert Lewis, each Assistant Curators, assembled the Museum's great ethnographic collection from Melanesia and the Philippines with the help of S. C. Simms, Fletcher Gardner and Laura Benedict. Major Native American holdings continued to be assembled, and a fine Egyptian archaeological collection was purchased in Alexandria over a period of only three months. In 1909, Assistant Curator William Jones, the nation's first Native American Ph.D. in anthropology, was killed during fieldwork in the Philippines. Dorsey was succeeded by Berthold Laufer, who had been appointed Associate Curator in 1908. Laufer served as Curator until his death in 1934. With a doctorate in oriental languages from the University of Leipzig, Laufer was a sinologist who was fluent in more than a dozen languages, many of which were non Indo-Eurpoean. He was responsible for assembling many of the linguistic texts in the anthropology library, many of which are unique and irreplaceable sources, as well as most of the Museum's important collection of Chinese and Tibetan artifacts. Major archaeological projects continued in the Americas, including the work of A. L. Kroeber in Peru, J. Alden Mason in Columbia and J. Eric Thompson in British Honduras (Belize). These three expeditions provided a huge corpus of archaeological collections that remain the core of anthropology's South and Middle American holdings. It was also during this period that the Anthropology Department firmly established itself as a major research department outside of the New World, with a series of research and collecting expeditions to many areas of the world outside of the Americas including the work of Henry Field in Iraq, Laufer's work in China and Ralph Linton's work in Madagascar. Laufer and Linton's work in particular stand as major scientific achievements and their work continues to be cited today. After Laufer's death, Paul S. Martin was appointed Acting Curator and was given the new title of Chief Curator in 1936. Of course, Martin assumed his position in the middle of the Great Depression, and fieldwork was severely curtailed. From 1935 to 1941, there were only four anthropology expeditions, and none were conducted during World War II. Under Martin's tenure, the Museum purchased from Captain A. W. F. Fuller his great collection of 6,500 ethnographic specimens from Oceania, with the enthusiastic support of Stanley Field. After Captain Fuller's death in 1961, Mrs. Fuller gave the Museum her very important collection of Benin objects from Nigeria. This gift, combined with previous holdings, made The Field Museum's collection of Benin materials comparable to those found in the British Museum and the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. The end of the war also saw two fundamental changes that affected museum anthropology. First, there was a clear shift from Museum and donor-sponsored expeditions to foundation and government-funded research. Second, foreign nations increasingly forbade the export of valuable archaeological and historical objects. Fortunately, Paul Martin was one of the great archaeologists of the time able to adapt to this changing climate. His research interest was squarely scientific in nature focusing on the interaction of humans within their environment. Martin was part of a great intellectual movement in archaeology that shifted the focus of research away from historical reconstructions and towards the testing of scientific models of human behavior. As a result, there was a concomitant shift in what archaeologists collected. Instead of focusing on the elaborate objects of the art, archaeologists began collecting scientifically valuable objects, such as potsherds, ancient pollen and bone, soil and the like. Martin received major funding from the young National Science Foundation and led many research projects to the American Southwest raising the profile of The Field Museum in the anthropological community. He set new standards for archaeological research, initiated interdisciplinary research designs testing models of human and ecological interactions, defined settlement patterns, documented environmental change and studied the origins of agriculture and the first settled villages. Given these shifts in the discipline, it is fortunate that The Field Museum is one of the great museums of the United States that began at the turn of the century when collections could be accumulated from around the world. As a result, The Field Museum has enormous exhibit and research collections that today are not importable from most countries or even some states in the United States. Also, the status of The Field Museum encourages major donations of objects collected and imported when it was legal. Therefore, as Field Museum and other anthropologists continue to collect scientifically valuable objects and strategically add to the collections, these build on enormous existing collections so as to meet the Museum's research, exhibit and general educational missions. The scientific framework and the collections strategies of the present Anthropology Department were in essence born in the Martin era. Paul Martin moved to emeritus status in 1964, but continued to be extraordinarily active in the field until his death. Martin was succeeded as Chair of the Department by Donald Collier, Curator of Middle and South American anthropology. Collier, an archaeologist, had brought major scientific collections to The Field Museum in the 1950's from his excavations in Ecuador and his archaeological reconnaissances in Peru and Ecuador. These included the type collection for an early agricultural site on the coast of Ecuador, and collections of pottery and field notes of many archaeological sites now destroyed in Peru. His work greatly expanded the scope of our Andean collections and added to those previously collected by Kroeber, Dorsey and others. During this period, James W. VanStone joined the Department. One of the eminent Alaskan anthropologists of his time, VanStone conducted extensive archaeological and ethnological research in the Arctic, and he continues to extensively publish his materials. Phillip H. Lewis also joined the museum during this period, and began his work on New Ireland culture and art and greatly added to the expertise of the Department in Oceanic anthropology. Glen Cole also joined the Department as Curator of Prehistory and excavated paleolithic sites in Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia. James W. VanStone became the first Chairman of Anthropology in the newly devised system of rotating Chairships that continues to the present day. In the 1970's the Department added several new curators: Bennet Bronson, John Terrell and Michael Moseley. Michael Moseley initiated a major research program in southern Peru, in cooperation with the Southern Peru Copper Corporation. After James W. VanStone completed his chairship, it rotated to Glen Cole, Phil Lewis, John Terrell, Bennet Bronson, Charles Stanish, and Alaka Wali. Throughout this time, the present curatorial staff took its shape, with the addition of Jonathan Haas in 1992, Anna Roosevelt in 1992, Alaka Wali in 1994, Chapurukha Kusimba in 1994, and Anne Underhill and Gary Feinman in 1999. In 1999, Gary Feinman began his term as Department Chair. The Department now officially holds more than 600,000 objects. In reality, this figure is an extremely low estimate, given that one catalog number is generally assigned to a box of specimens that may number into the hundreds. The total collection in anthropology, if assessed as other museums do by individual objects, would number well over 1,500,000 and possibly over 2,000,000 objects. The collection continues to grow, particularly in ethnographic and scientific archaeological objects, and continues to focus its strengths on the American Southwest, the American Midwest, Alaska, Mexico, Central America, the Andes, East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Oceania and sub-Saharan Africa.