The papers of anthropologist Ward Goodenough cover his whole career, most of it spent in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. After service in army during WW II, Goodenough received a Ph.D. from Yale in 1949. He conducted field research from 1947 to 1965, working at Chuuk (Truk), the Gilberts, Papua New Guinea, and New Britain. The collection is particularly important in showing how linguistic theory can help further anthropological theory.

The Reina Papers contain the professional papers of cultural anthropologist Ruben E. Reina (1924-2016). Reina is an emeritus professor of anthropology and curator of ethnology who taught at the University of Pennsylvania and worked at that institution's University Museum of Archeology and Anthropology from 1957-1990. Broadly interested in modern and historical cultures of Central America, South America, and Spain, he is most widely known for his contributions to the study of the culture and peoples of Guatemala. The collection contains Reina's correspondence, administrative records, teaching materials, research notes, subject files, and written works from his career. Of particular interest are the notes from his fieldwork in Guatemala, Argentina, Spain, and Puerto Rico. A further significant component of the papers is the records of the Hispanic-Latin American Research Project. Reina served as director of the long-term project (1967-1988), during which a team of scholars compiled thousands of pages of Spanish colonial materials from the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Seville, Spain and Archivos General de Centro America (AGCA) in Guatemala. The Reina Papers serve as a vital storehouse of this important historical material.

An archaeological anthropologist and linguist, John Alden Mason spent the majority of his career at the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. After receiving his undergraduate degree at Penn in 1907, Mason received a doctorate at Berkeley (1911) for his ethnographic work on the Salinan Indians of California, but his diverse interests in later years ran the gamut from Puerto Rican folklore to Piman languages and cultures (including Pima, Papago, Pima Bajo, Northern and Southern Tepehuan, and Tepecano), Mayan, Aztec, and Incan archaeology, and the languages of South American Indians. Mason was curator of the University Museum at Penn from 1926 until his retirement in 1958. The Mason Papers include both in-coming and outgoing correspondence, linguistic material, notes, and photographs relating to Mason's work in the southwestern U.S., northern Mexico, and South America. Centered on the years after Mason's return to Philadelphia in 1926, the collection covers all aspects of Mason's professional life, from reports on field work to answering casual questions referred to him through the University Museum to data and analyses on Piman and other languages. The collection also contains voluminous files relating to the Mason's editorship of the American Anthropologist (bulk: 1945-1948). Of special note are a series of class notes (1908-1910) kept by Mason for course work in ethnology, archaeology, and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania under Edward Sapir and Frank Speck.