Initially published in 2000, this beautiful paperback reprint of respected archaeologist Don Fowler's A Laboratory for Anthropology tells the sweeping history tells of an idea, "The Southwest," through the development of American anthropology and archaeology. For eighty years following the end of the Mexican-American War, anthropologists described the people, culture, and land of the American Southwest to cultural tastemakers and consumers on the East Coast. Digging deeply into public and private historical records, the author uses biographical vignettes to recreate the men and women who pioneered American anthropology and archaeology in the Southwest. He explores institutions such as the Smithsonian, the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the School of American Research, and the American Museum of Natural History, which influenced the southwestern research agenda, published results, and exhibited artifacts. Equally influential in this popular movement were the "Yearners"-novelists, poets, painters, photographers, and others-such as Alice Corbin, Oliver La Farge, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Laura Adams Armer, whose literature and art incorporated southwestern ethnography, sought the essence of the Indian and Hispano world, and substantially shaped the cultural impression of the Southwest for the American public. Fowler brings this history to a close on the eve of the New Deal, which dramatically restructured the practice of anthropology and archaeology in the United States.
Don Fowler is Mamie Kleberg Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Historic Preservation Emeritus, University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of more than 120 scholarly publications in archaeology, historic preservation, Western exploration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the history of American anthropology.
Preface? Foreword by Brian Fagan Prologue: The Land and the People Introduction: Origins of American Anthropology 1. Documenting the Southwest, 1540-1846 2. The Topographical Engineers in the Southwest 3. Legends and Ruins, 1846-1859 4. Army Ethnographic Observations, 1846-1860 5. The Great Surveys 6. The Bureau of Ethnology: Organizing Anthropological Research in America 7. The Bureau and the Southwest 8. Cushing, Matthews, Bourke, and Compatriots 9. Washington Matthews 10. Bourke, Keam, and Stephen 11. The Mindeleff Brothers 12. The Bureau after Powell 13. The Hemenway Expedition 14. Jesse Walter Fewkes: From Ichthyologist to Ethnologist 15. Bandelier, Bancroft, and Bolton 16. The Wetherills and NordenskiOEld 17. World's Fairs, Museums, and Modern Anthropology 18. Universities, Museums, and Anthropology 19. Building a New American Anthropology 20. The Western Scholar-Entrepreneurs 21. Byron Cummings 22. Edgar Lee Hewett 23. A "New Archaeology" in the Southwest 24. Expanding the New Archaeology 25. A. V. Kidder and Southwestern Archaeology 26. Ethnography in the Southwest 27. Inventing the Southwest, 1890-1930 28. Literary and Pictorial Ethnography 29. New Institutions, New Directions 30. Epilogue Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index
"As a thoughtful and well-illustrated introduction to the beginnings of southwestern archaeology for the general reader, A Laboratory of Archaeology has no rival."-Brian Fagan, University of California, Santa Barbara "A fascinating story accessible to all who are interested in the American Southwest. For those of us studying the history of anthropology, it is an essential reference for that foundation period in the initial conceptualization of the Southwest as a landscape and as an anthropological laboratory."-J. Jefferson Reid, University of Arizona
