John Peabody Harrington

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John Peabody Harrington (1884-1961) was an American linguist and ethnologist and a specialist in the native peoples of California.

Born in Massachusetts, Harrington moved to California as a child. From 1902 to 1905, Harrington studied anthropology and classical languages at Stanford University. While attending specialized classes at the University of California, Berkeley, he met anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, whose work was described by his wife Theodora in the book "Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America". Harrington became intensely interested in Native American languages and ethnography.

Rather than completing his doctorate at the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin, Harrington became a high school language teacher. For three years, he devoted his spare time to an intense examination of the few surviving Chumash people. His exhaustive work came to the attention of the Smithsonian Museum's Bureau of American Ethnology. Harrington became a permanent field ethnologist for the bureau in 1915. He was to hold this position for 40 years, collecting and compiling several massive caches of raw data on native peoples, including the Chumash, Ohlone, Kiowa, Chimariko, Yokuts, Gabrielino, Salinan, Yuma and Mojave. He is credited with gathering some of the first recordings of native languages, rituals and songs and perfecting the phonetics of several different languages.