Johnson, Frederick, 1904-1994

Frederick Johnson (1904-1994) was an anthropologist and longtime curator (1936-1968) at the Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology, in Andover, Massachusetts. He is recognized for contributing to the development of an interdisciplinary approach to archaeology, in which scientists from a variety of fields were brought together to study archaeological problems. He organized the collaboration of fifteen scientists on the Boylston Street Fish Weir project in 1939 in Boston, and later, another smaller collaborative project, the Andover-Harvard Yukon Expedition in Alaska in 1944 and 1948.

On the national level, he organized the Committee for the Recovery of Archaeological Remains, 1945-1968, and chaired the American Anthropological Association's Committee on Radioactive Carbon 14, 1948-1968. He was charged with providing archeological and geological advice and assistance to Dr. Willard F. Libby in his research on radiocarbon dating, for which Libby was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in chemistry; Johnson later became president of the Radiocarbon Dates Association.

Johnson took ethnographic photographs of the Mi'kmaq, Innu, Algonquin, Potawatomi, Montagnais, Abenaki, Anishinaabe, and Mistassini Cree peoples of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Quebec, Canada in the 1920s-1930s. His photographs of the Mi'kmaq were the subject of a collaborative exhibit and accompanying publication between the Confederacy of Mainland Mi'kmaq and the Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology, "Mikwite'lmanej Mikmaqi'k / Let Us Remember the Old Mi'kmaq" in 2000-2001.