American anthropologist who was a leader in the founding of anthropological science in the United States. He helped to develop two of the nation's foremost centres of anthropological research at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, and had a prominent part in founding or building four major anthropological museum collections.

Entering Harvard College (1856), Putnam served as assistant (1857–64) to the eminent naturalist Louis Agassiz (Agassiz, Louis). He left Harvard without a degree and held zoological curatorships before becoming curator of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard (1875–1909). Putnam was one of the first to recognize and examine American archaeological remains, and he directed pioneer field expeditions in Ohio, New Jersey, the American Southwest, Mexico, and Central and South America.

Putnam was appointed professor of ethnology at Harvard in 1887, and in 1891 he began organizing the anthropological section of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. That collection became the basis of Chicago's well-known Field Museum of Natural History. In 1894 he began devoting half his time to the curatorship in anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, and was influential in dispatching the productive Jesup North Pacific Expedition to northeastern Asia and northwestern North America. In 1903 he went to the University of California, Berkeley, to organize both the new department of anthropology and the anthropological museum. Putnam published more than 400 zoological and anthropological articles, reports, and notes and was also a founder and the editor of the periodical American Naturalist.