THE FATHER OF SOUTHWESTERN ARCHAEOLOGY

A.V. Kidder’s landmark work at Pecos Pueblo established a new scientific methodology.

By Tamara Stewart

Alfred Vincent (“Ted”) Kidder was born in Marquette, Michigan, in 1885. As a young man, he frequently read, and was fascinated by, archaeological reports, but the desire for a successful career prompted him to pursue a Harvard medical degree. Taking a break from his increasingly tedious medical studies in the summer of 1907, Kidder volunteered for an archaeological expedition led by Edgar Lee Hewett, director of the School of American Ar-

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 biA. V. Kidder, dressed in a white suit and Panama hat, visits Pecos Pueblo after it was reconstructed. ographer and archaeologist Richard Woodbury. Kidder returned to Harvard that fall, switched his major to anthropology, and graduated in 1908. The following summer, he toured archaeological sites in Greece and Egypt with his parents, whose friends, the Appletons of Boston, joined them. The Appletons’ young daughter Madeleine and Ted met and fell in love, marrying two years later. Kidder began graduate work back at Harvard in 1909, studying under the direction of several leading archaeologists, including Egyptologist George Reisner, who taught

modern archaeological field techniques such as the new systematic excavation method known as “stratigraphy.” The analysis of pottery design and decoration, which Kidder studied under George Chase, proved to be a very useful skill in his later work at Pecos. In 1914, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard with a dissertation in Southwestern ceramics, a topic that continued to fascinate him throughout his life. At that time, Kidder was one of only six American students to receive an advanced degree in archaeology and the first student to write a dissertation on Southwestern archaeology.

EXCAVATIONS AT PECOS PUEBLO

The year after receiving his doctorate Kidder began work at Pecos Pueblo in New Mexico, where he was appointed leader of the Peabody Southwestern Expedition at Pecos. Trustees of the Phillips Academy of Andover, Massachusetts, backed by the Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology, had decided to sponsor long-term excavations at a Southwestern Pueblo Indian site. Kidder, believing that investigations at Pecos, which was occupied from prehistoric through historic times, might speak to the prehistory of the entire Southwest, chose this site as the focus of the expedition. He was particularly interested in the connections between prehistoric settlement at Pecos, the Galisteo Basin to the east, the Rio Grande pueblos, and the major archaeological sites Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde to the north.

Fieldwork at Pecos ran from 1915 until 1929, with a two-year hiatus during which Kidder served in World War I. Kidder, Madeleine, and their five children stayed close to the pueblo ruins in an old adobe house at the adjacent Forked Lightning Ruin (now part of the Pecos National Monument), while the work crews camped nearby. The Kidders’ famous 1911 vintage Model-T Ford known as Old Blue was a common sight out in the field, as it was used to portage groceries and other necessities to the workers. The remains of Old Blue can still be seen at Forked Lightning Ruin, parked in a grove of trees near a plaque that marks the graves of Ted and Madeleine.

Nels C. Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History applied the stratigraphic approach to his archaeological research in the Galisteo Basin of north-central New Mexico between 1912 and 1914, marking a major scientific turning point in Southwestern archaeology. Derived from geology, the basic concept is that the youngest material is found on the top, with each underlying layer representing an older deposit, thus making it possible to assign a relative date to the various levels.

Following Nelson’s lead, Kidder and his workers dug carefully into the immense refuse heap at Pecos, noting each visible stratigraphic layer and labeling each artifact according to the layer it was found in. The oldest artifacts were in the deepest layers. Unlike Nelson and other American archaeologists, Kidder defined the stratigraphic layers in accordance with the earth’s natural layers, rather than marking them off in arbitrary, uniform increments. He also laid a grid over the excavation area that, in combination with the stratigraphic profiles, allowed the workers to note the positions of artifacts both vertically and horizontally, in space and time. Following the excavations, Kidder directed his crew to backfill the exposed rooms in order to protect them from the elements. Like stratigraphy, backfilling has become a standard archaeological practice.

Kidder paid particular attention to the thousands of ceramic sherds discovered in stratigraphic layers at Pecos. With the help of Madeleine and his assistants, who undertook the immense task of cleaning and sorting the sherds, Kidder defined eight major pottery types based on the details of their attributes such as decoration, color, finish, thickness, and shape. His careful stratigraphic excavations allowed him to determine the pottery types’ place in the site’s chronological sequence, enabling him to “crossdate” Pecos artifacts with those from other Pueblo sites.

Kidder realized early in his career that a multidisciplinary approach to archaeology, which is now widely prac-

Workers dig a stratigraphic profile at the site. Experimental back then, stratigraphic profiling is now standard archaeological procedure.

ticed, was the only way to achieve a broad understanding of the past. When some 200 burials were recovered from Pecos’s massive trash midden during the first field season, Kidder invited physical anthropologist Earnest A. Hooton of the Peabody Museum to join the research team. Hooton stayed two months and brought ten years’ worth of material to analyze back at the Peabody Museum. He published his landmark book The Indians of Pecos Pueblo: A Study of Their Skeletal Remains in 1930,which provided detailed information about the prehistoric peoples’ life span, health, and diet. Hooton was one of several researchers specializing in other fields of science that contributed to Kidder’s Pecos endeavor.

As work progressed at the site, a clearer picture of Pecos Pueblo began to emerge. The site’s strategic location between the Great Plains that stretch to the east and the fertile Rio Grande Valley to the west was a major factor in its prehistoric rise to prominence as a trade center. Once inhabited by some 2,000 Pueblo people and surrounded by a high stone wall for defense, Pecos brought together Pueblo farming communities of the northern Rio Grande and the nomadic hunting tribes of the plains. With the arrival of the Spanish to the region in the late 16th century, a mission was built just east of the pueblo in 1618. The Spanish mission was destroyed in the Pueblo Revolt of

1680, and rebuilt in the early 18th century following the Spanish reconquest of New Mexico. Disease epidemics and repeated invasions by Apaches and Comanche greatly reduced the Pecos population until, in 1838, the remaining few moved northwest to join relatives at Jemez Pueblo. In 1924, Kidder published An Introduction to the Study of Southwestern Archaeology, with a Preliminary Account of the Excavations at Pecos, which provided the basis for the Southwestern cultural chronology that became formalized as the Pecos Classification. Considered a classic, the volume represented the first regional archaeologiJessie L. Nusbaum (left) and Kidder are seen above Spruce Tree House at Mesa Verde in this photograph taken in 1908. cal synthesis formulated for any part of the New World, and it was especially significant for its concept of Southwestern culture areas and groups, including discussions of the modern pueblos and their prehistoric counterparts.

THE FIRST PECOS CONFERENCE

Kidder invited other Southwestern archaeologists to join him at Pecos in the summer of 1927 in order to discuss archaeological issues and to develop a classification system that would identify the cultural development of Southwestern peoples. By this time, Kidder had ceased work at the main ruins of Pecos and had begun investigations at nearby Forked Lightning Ruin, a smaller, older site immediately ancestral to the settlement of Pecos. About 40 archaeologists participated in the first Pecos Conference, arriving from all over the Southwest to join the informal three-day gathering. With input from his colleagues, Kidder formulated the Pecos Classification, the well-known Basketmaker through Pueblo prehistoric culture period classification that is still applied to the northern Southwest. The first meeting was so successful, it has continued, with the occasional interruption, as an annual gathering of Southwestern archaeologists to this day, held at different venues for three days in late summer, always returning to its birthplace every fifth year or so. The initial conference “laid a foundation for a tradi-

tion in Southwestern archaeology, which Kidder himself referred to as the ‘Pecos Clan Spirit,’ and many of us have benefited from the friendships which were cemented on that occasion,” recalled archaeologist Odd Halseth in Richard Woodbury’s book 60 Years of Southwestern Archaeology: A History of the Pecos Conference.

The 1920s were an exciting time in Southwestern archaeology. The famous 1927 discovery of a projectile point embedded in an extinct species of bison near Folsom, New Mexico, dramatically changed the face of New World archaeology. All of a sudden prehistory on this continent stretched back much farther than had been previously thought. The development of tree ring dating by astronomer Andrew Ellicott Douglass two years later allowed for the absolute dating of Southwestern archaeological sites, a major breakthrough that grounded Kidder’s relative chronology in real time.

During the Pecos Conference in 1929, archaeologists viewed aerial photographs of Southwestern archaeological sites including Pecos Pueblo that were taken by aviator Charles Lindbergh at Kidder’s suggestion. Woodbury states: “Lindbergh’s work presaged coming decades in which aerial photography and, eventually, infrared remote sensing technology, would provide detailed data on sites from the air.”

TURNING TO THE MAYA

TAMARA STEWART is the assistant editor of American Archaeology and the Conservancy’s Southwest project’s coordinator.

By this time, Kidder had shifted his research focus to the Maya region of North America, inspired by his lifelong friend Sylvanius Morley. A leading scholar of Maya hieroglyphs, Morley had begun a long-term research program in the Maya region in 1914 with the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Kidder first visited Morley’s project at Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, in 1925 as a consultant to the Carnegie. The following year he became a research associate with the Carnegie, and in 1927 accepted the position of director of Carnegie’s entire archaeological program. Until his retirement in 1950, Kidder directed intensive excavations at the sites of Chichén Itzá and Uaxactun in the Yucatán, and Kaminaljuyu in Guatemala. These were among the first major archaeological investigations to employ a team of specialists in the fields of physical and social anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, environmental studies, geology, and geography, among others.

Following his retirement from the Carnegie, Kidder remained active in archaeology, teaching briefly at the University of California, Berkeley before retiring to his Cambridge home. In 1958, nearly 30 years after the completion of fieldwork at Pecos, Kidder published his summary of the work, titled Pecos, New Mexico: Archaeological Notes, lauded for its scientific detail and literary style. Just a few years prior, Southwestern archaeologists of the American Anthropological Association had established the A. V. Kidder Award, a prestigious award presented every third year “for eminence in the field of American archaeology,” recognizing Kidder’s great contributions to the scientific advancement of the field. In 1986, the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala Department of Archaeology was established with funds from the Alfred V. and Madeleine Kidder Chair in honor of Kidder. In a statement memorializing the death of A. V. Kidder in 1963, Halseth described him: “He was the sparkplug, even though his methods of seeking and getting cooperation were always low-voltage. His personality as well as his scholarship disarmed any rebel in camp, and though no one could be more generous and kind, his integrity of purpose and judgment never was compromised.” Two biographies of Alfred V. Kidder have been written: Alfred V. Kidder, by Richard Woodbury, Columbia University Press, 1973; Alfred Vincent Kidder to the Development of Americanist Archaeology, by Douglas Givens, University of New Mexico Press, 1992. Kidder (lower right) surveys trenches in the north midden at Pecos in 1915. He’s again dressed in a suit, which was standard attire for the professional staff at the dig.