The comparatively recent and rapid expansion of museum studies, accompanied by increased work in the history of collecting (Impey and Macgregor), offers a fertile ground for examining the origins of several disciplines including archaeology. Historians of anthropology not only were among the first to recognize this fact, they also gave currency to the expression "museum period" to characterize an early stage in that field's nascence (Sturtevant 1969, Stocking 1985). Of course nearly all disciplines relying on the study and interpretation of material objects have passed through their own museum periods. But the historiographers of those other disc...