Phillips Exeter’s Historic Artifacts Explored
In addition to famous paintings and antique books, Phillips Exeter Academy’s artifact collection includes a broad range of historic objects, from Tarentine stone sculptures to Etruscan drinking cups that date back to a few centuries BC. Most of these artifacts reside in display cases in the Anthropology Museum and the Latin Study—both of which are located in the Academy Building—and remain unknown to most of the student body, as access is rarely permitted.
It has not always been this way. Immediately after its installation in 1976, the Anthropology Museum attracted intrigue and excitement from students and faculty alike. Former History Instructor and archaeologist Donald Foster said that he kept the museum open most days of the week so that students could freely examine its collection, even without teacher supervision.
On top of serving as a hub of activity and academic curiosity for members of the Academy, the museum also garnered attention from researchers and historians in the area. Admittedly, its collection used to be more prolific—for more than thirty years after its establishment, the Anthropology museum served as the repository of the esteemed New Hampshire Archeological Society. “Volunteers of the NH Archeology Society visited the Anthropology Museum on a weekly basis to curate the Society Collection,” Foster explained. He even secured a research grant from the Bean Foundation and hired students to analyze the Society artifacts. According to Foster, the Anthropology Museum originally started as a “series of display boards to exhibit a selection of artifacts,” curated by Howard Stern, an archaeologist at Franklin Pierce College, in the summer of 1955.
“I have a particular interest in archaeology. I also do want to see what’s in the Anthropology Museum very much, but it’s always locked.”
Over time the Academy’s archives grew, with five major donations from the Phillips, Crosbie, Rogers, Kellogg and Warner families, who are all closely affiliated with the Academy. There were also numerous smaller donations, most notably the 5000 stone tools, pottery shards and 20,000 flakes of stone that former instructor Eugene Finch amassed as an amateur archaeologist digging around New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont. Past students have also contributed to the collection through archaeological endeavors they partook in during their time at the Academy. “Students in one of my archaeology classes excavated a number of sites in residential Exeter that dated to the Colonial and Early American Period,” Foster said. “At another time, students excavated sites along the Exeter River south of town dated to the prehistoric period.” He further explained that “prehistoric” meant “the period of time before the Europeans arrived.”
These objects were regularly incorporated into lessons, especially those taught by Foster. Rumors circulated among previous generations of Exonians about human skulls and other “mysterious” objects on display in Foster’s classroom and the Anthropology Museum. According to alumnus Christina Beck ’13, “Mr. Foster used to pause mid-sentence and disappear during our A format African History class, reappearing from the neighboring Anthropology Museum with a demonstrative artifact in hand—sometimes a skull.” When asked about the authenticity of these skulls, Foster disclosed that some were authentic plaster cast reproductions of early human skulls and others were real skulls of modern humans. “There is also a skull cap of a native person in the Crosbie Collection,” he said. “This should be located in one of the storage drawers the Museum Room.”
The Latin Study also holds an impressive collection of artifacts, including oil lamps, figurines and fragments of ancient papyri. “We did have a professor come a few years ago who was able to read a little bit of the material of the papyrus and determined it was some kind of tax document, I believe,” Instructor of Classical Languages Megan Campbell said, affirming the authenticity of the artifacts. She emphasized the importance of having donor-given objects, rather than those obtained through store purchases. “A lot of [the artifacts on auction] come through the black market so you lose a lot of archaeological context when these items are taken out of their physical context by looters,” she said. Campbell noted, however, that there have been few formal attempts by the school to hire researchers to examine the collection and precisely estimate its historical value. By looking at the design, she could “roughly determine the period,” but “It would be nice to have someone come and examine them in order to give more information about where they come from and when,” she said.
Interest in the artifacts seems to be starting to grow once again. Chair of the Classical Languages Department Nicholas Unger said that his department just tried to categorize and provide more information about the objects. “Recently, we made more effort to reorganize them, because some of them were just jumbled all over,” he said. He went on, expressing his hope that this would encourage more students to appreciate their immense historical value. “Most of the students walked by barely noticing them [...] hopefully they do pause and read the captions now,” he said.
Furthermore, progress has been made regarding the incorporation of Academy-owned artifacts in history and anthropology classrooms. During her Classical Rome and Ancient Greek classes, Campbell introduced students relics such as the cuneiform tablet, which came from the ancient near East, and the strigil, a crescent-shaped piece of metal used to scrape off body dirt by ancient Greeks and Romans.
However, not all students taking classical world electives have had the same experience. According to lower Dhanat Plewtianyingthawee, who took Classical Rome last winter, these artifacts were not incorporated into his lessons, although he had seen “several artifacts that the History Department owned, including pottery as well as some ancient tools,” after examining the Latin Study display cases on his own time. Prep Grace Ferguson also echoed these sentiments, explaining that her class did not hold discussions about the school’s artifacts, and that she would have liked to know more about their origin. “I have a particular interest in archaeology, ” she said. “I also do want to see what’s in the Anthropology Museum very much, but it’s always locked.”