A SURVEY OF SOUTHWESTERN ARCHEOLOGY - 



By Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr. 

 Bureau of American Ethnology 



[With 9 plates] 



Southwestern archeology has long occupied a prominent place in 

 North American anthropological researches, but at no time since 

 investigations were started has there been as wide-spread an interest 

 or so marked a diversity of effort in the area as that of today. In- 

 tensive studies and numerous conferences have produced so much 

 material that it is difficult for those not directly concerned with the 

 field to keep abreast of its developments. Several articles, reports, 

 and books appearing in recent months review the archeology of the 

 region in an effort to explain the present status of the subject. There 

 is still some misconception, however, about various phases of the 

 problem, and a number of features, particularly earlier contribu- 

 tions, have been so consistently overlooked that an additional resume 

 may not be out of place. 



Early Spanish explorers observed and recorded ruins which lay 

 along their routes of travel, but it was not until the middle of the 

 nineteenth century that the remains began to receive serious atten- 

 tion. Members of the various military and survey parties of the 

 westward expanding United States included in their official re- 

 ports descriptions, plans, and drawings of the antiquities which 

 they encountered. In fact, several of the major expeditions had 

 men assigned to that phase of the explorations. As a result con- 

 siderable interest was aroused in the subject, and definite steps were 

 taken to place the governmental researches on a sound basis by 

 consolidating them and putting them under the direction of the 

 Smithsonian Institution. Universities, museums, and foreign in- 

 vestigators were attracted to the field, and private individuals or- 

 ganized expeditions to hunt for " relics " both for their personal 

 curio cabinets and to sell. From that time onward there has been 

 an ever-increasing zeal on the part of diggers. When the eastern 



^ Reprinted, by permission, with some revision, omissions, and the addition of illustra- 

 tions, from the American Anthropologist, vol. 37, no. 1, January-March 1935. 



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