As a student and collaborator of Louis Agassiz on the study of fishes, F. W. Putnam gave promise of becoming a leading ichthyologist with special interest in taxonomy generally and the Etheostomidae in particular. While he was noted briefly in these fields, contributed a number of minor papers, and aided in the posthumous publications of some of Agassiz's work on fishes, he neither reached his original goal nor completed his major projected works. For in 1874 he switched careers and was (...) appointed Curator of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, and is remembered today primarily as a founder of American archaeology rather than as a systematic ichthyologist. (shrink)