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The Father of Southwestern Archaeology A. V. Kidder’s landmark work at Pecos Pueblo established a new scientific methodology. chaeology (now the School of American Research). For six weeks, Kidder and two other Harvard students conducted an archaeological survey of sites in the Four Corners area of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Later that summer they joined Hewett at Mesa Verde in Colorado, where they mapped some of the cliff ruins, and then conducted excavations at the prehistoric site of Puye on New Mexico’s Pajarito Plateau. In the process, the medical student made his mark in this emerging field, becoming one of the first of a generation of new archaeologists to take careful notes and approach the study of archaeology in a more scientific way. “This impressive introduction to Southwestern archaeology determined the direction of Kidder’s life,” says biographer and archaeologist Richard A. V. Kidder, dressed in a white suit and Panama hat, visits Pecos Pueblo after it was reconstructed. Woodbury. Kidder returned to Harvard that fall, switched his major to anthropology, and lfred Vincent (“Ted”) Kidder was born in graduated in 1908. The following summer, he toured arMarquette, Michigan, in 1885. As a young chaeological sites in Greece and Egypt with his parents, man, he frequently read, and was fascinated whose friends, the Appletons of Boston, joined them. The by, archaeological reports, but the desire for a Appletons’ young daughter Madeleine and Ted met and successful career prompted him to pursue a fell in love, marrying two years later. Harvard medical degree. Taking a break from his increasKidder began graduate work back at Harvard in 1909, ingly tedious medical studies in the summer of 1907, Kidstudying under the direction of several leading archaeoloder volunteered for an archaeological expedition led by gists, including Egyptologist George Reisner, who taught Edgar Lee Hewett, director of the School of American Ar-
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70.4/642, LABORATORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY, MUSEUM OF INDIAN ARTS AND CULTURE
By Tamara Stewart
