Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
Ten thousand years of human life in the Americas, bankrolled by a single financier's 1866 gift and still growing.
Coming soon on iOS — be first to walk Boston offline.
George Peabody's $150,000 gift founded one of the oldest and largest anthropology museums in the world. The 1.2 million-object collection focuses deep rather than broad — the Americas and Pacific Islands above all — with North American artifacts alone spanning 10,000 years from the Northeast to the Southwest.
What to look for
- Mimbres collections from the American Southwest, part of North American holdings that account for more than a quarter of the museum's 1.2 million objects
- The archival stacks: roughly 500,000 photographs and 2,000 maps and site plans, alongside 900 feet of documents
- The 1877 building itself, expanded in 1888 and again in 1913 — three building campaigns spanning more than three decades
On Divinity Avenue on the Harvard University campus; one of four Harvard Museums of Science and Culture open to the public.
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology is one of 31 sights worth the detour in Boston, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Boston pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Boston
- Museum of Fine Arts BostonFour hundred and fifty thousand works of art under one roof — one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas.
- TD GardenThe subway stops underneath it — TD Garden is built directly above MBTA's North Station, so you step off the train and you are already at the door.
- Harvard College ObservatoryOn the night of July 16-17, 1850, astronomers here made the first daguerreotype of a star — Vega — through a telescope that was the largest in North America.
- Fenway ParkThe oldest active ballpark in MLB, where a cramped city block accidentally invented some of baseball's most famous features.
- Isabella Stewart Gardner MuseumIn 1990, thieves walked out with thirteen works worth $500 million — none have ever come back, and the case is still open.
- Boston Public LibraryJohn Adams' personal 3,800-volume library lives here — and any Massachusetts adult can walk in and access it.