With Opening the Museum, the Peabody Museum Press launches a new series of Occasional Papers. These periodic publications present essays, short research papers, and works-in-progress relevant to contemporary museum issues and museum history. In Volume I, Peabody Museum director Rubie Watson presents three snapshots in time of the museum and its changing nature: in 1877, 1928, and 2001. The oldest museum of anthropology in the Americas, the Peabody is dedicated to collecting, researching, housing, displaying, and interpreting the artifacts and material culture of societies around the world. Its history, as ably interpreted by Wilson, has reflected the changing nature not only of museums but of the study of anthropology over time.

Highlighting one of the Peabody Museum's most important archaeological expeditions—the excavation of the Swarts Ranch Ruin in southwestern New Mexico by Harriet and Burton Cosgrove in the mid-1920s—Steven LeBlanc's book features rare, never-before-published examples of Mimbres painted pottery, considered by many scholars to be the most unique of all the ancient art traditions of North America. Made between A.D. 1000 and 1150, these pottery bowls and jars depict birds, fish, insects, and mammals that the Mimbres encountered in their daily lives, portray mythical beings, and show humans participating in both ritual and everyday activities. LeBlanc traces the origins of the Mimbres people and what became of them, and he explores our present understanding of what the images mean and what scholars have learned about the Mimbres people in the 75 years since the Cosgroves' expedition.