The Beginnings of Anthropological Archaeology in the North American Southwest: From Thomas Jefferson to the Pecos Conference

Wilcox, David R., Fowler, Don D., Journal of the Southwest

This special monograph issue of Journal of the Southwest presents a developmental history of anthropological archaeology in the North American Southwest within the context of western American exploration, the rise of Americanist anthropology, and the larger cultural milieu in which they took place. Our time frame is roughly 1780 to 1950, although that boundary is permeable. As vehicles for our discussion, we will focus on certain anthropological and archaeological issues, the intellectual and sociocultural factors underlying and giving rise to them, and research agendas developed to resolve them.

We define anthropology as a systematic worldwide inquiry into the origins, commensurability, and ranges of variation of human physical types, societies, cultures, and languages, past and present. For our purposes, anthropology subsumes ethnology as that field of study was defined in America and Europe from its inception in about 1840 until about 1880-90. In accord with Americanist anthropology, we define archaeology as one of its subfields, centrally concerned with the culture histories and processes of the past. (1)

By North American Southwest we refer both to a cultural-geographical area and a point of view. The anthropological Southwest is defined in terms of indigenous cultural traditions, rather than political boundaries; thus, it includes portions of both the present-day United States and Mexico. The cultural-geographical definition used here was articulated by Charles Lummis (1893, 1989), longtime promoter of anthropological study in, and tourist visits to, his romanticized vision of "the Southwest" (discussed later). Lummis's definition is similar to that of Erik Reed (1951: 428): the "Greater Southwest" extends from "Durango [Mexico] to Durango [Colorado] and from Las Vegas [New Mexico] to Las Vegas [Nevada]." By point of view we mean both a vaguely bounded area of land--a "region"--as seen from the East; that is, from the intellectual centers of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., and a series of layered cultural constructs--geographical, sociopolitical, literary, artistic, and anthropological--collectively seen as "the Southwest" (Byrkit 1992; Dilworth 1996; Fowler 2000; Howard and Pardue 1996). Mexican scholars refer to the region as the Greater Northwest, the Mexican American Southwest, or the Gran Chichimeca, as seen from Mexico City and the perspective of the preconquest civilizations of Mesoamerica. (2) Since our concern is with the "view from" the eastern United States, we use the term the Southwest in Lummis's sense.

The Southwest is especially important in the history of systematic exploration and research by federally and institutionally sponsored individuals and teams in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Southwestern anthropological "record," indeed most of its initial natural history and natural sciences records, were created by exploration and survey parties, most of them originating in the East. Walter Taylor's (1954: 566) quip that Southwestern archaeology suffers from an "expedition attitude" is apropos. Once local or territorial institutions of archaeology were formed in the Southwest, their values and goals at first contrasted with the anthropological objectives being articulated in eastern universities.

The Southwest also is a region on and in which some broad anthropological and historical controversies, begun elsewhere, came to be focused. Some of these were reformulated into "cutting-edge" anthropological questions applicable beyond the bounds of the Southwest, and research methods were developed to answer them, a process that is still ongoing.

EARLY ANTHROPOLOGY

Anthropology arose within two contexts. The first was the encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples in the New World and other colonial areas and the attempts by the former to categorize, understand, and "manage" the latter. The second was Enlightenment science, and within it an ongoing endeavor to create a Science of Man. There also was the parallel and intertwined development of modern world history, itself a product of the Enlightenment (McGrane 1989; Manuel 1959).

In the 1500s and 1600s, attempts to justify the conquest and subjugation of indigenous peoples led to controversies over commensurability: were native peoples as fully human as Europeans? A variety of answers was provided as European colonists and administrators in Seville (and later London and Paris), struggled to justify forced incorporation of indigenous populations into their economic and religious systems, or their eradication or relocation out of the way of colonial expansion. One controversy, then, had to do with commensurability. To what degree was the otherness, or alterity, of non-Europeans (as expressed in the range and variety of human psyches, physical forms, cultures, and languages), commensurable with the psyches, etc., of Europeans? Official mandates as to how indigenous peoples were to be treated, proselytized, and governed depended on the answers given--whether they were viewed as fully human, natural slaves, or lesser forms of subhumans (Hanke 1959; Pagden 1982, 1993).

There was also the related question of origins. Given the biblical framework for human history, Indian peoples had to have originated in the Old World, but where? When, how, and by what route(s) had they come to the New World? (Hallowell 1960; Huddleston 1967; Putnam 1901; Schuyler 1971). The questions were not only matters of intellectual curiosity, but also central to the issue of commensurability, since determining the groups or places from which Indians were derived would allow judgments as to their relative humanness vis-a-vis Europeans. Unfortunately, no clear answers were forthcoming.

To politicians and administrators, both secular and clerical, the otherness issue generated certain "management needs," to use modern parlance. It seemed prudent to learn about the cultural and political practices of native populations, the better to deal with them diplomatically or militarily, as they were eradicated, subjugated, converted, or forced into some sort of dependency relationship with a government or a church group.

There was a concerted attempt to develop a Science of Man within the general framework of Enlightenment science. Key questions were, What is "original" human nature? And what are the natural laws governing human behavior? Implicit in both these questions was the assumption of the psychic unity of all humankind. Answers were sought through the application of reason and the scientific method: an inductive research agenda designed to collect as much data as possible on the range and variety of human behavior so that commonalities could be determined that might give clues to underlying natural laws.

With the advent of science as a method of investigating the world came scholarly societies. The societies became focal points for debate and discussion, for collection and publication of data and hypotheses, and in some instances, for the development of archives and libraries. To assist in data collection the earliest scholarly group, the Royal Society, founded in 1660, produced printed Inquiries for circulation to travelers. Subsequent scholarly societies followed suit, preeminent among them the American Philosophical Society (Carter 1993; Chinard 1943a).

NORTH AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY

In North America, the foci of anthropological studies were the various Indian peoples (Hallowell 1959). Scholars, government officials, and missionaries all had reasons to study the peoples, their cultures, and their languages. By the mid-1700s, there was a general consensus that Indian people were fully human but were at an earlier stage of technical and sociocultural development. The stage concept was central to the comparative method, the linchpin of the nascent Science of Man. The method centered on the Enlightenment concept of primitivism, that the "original" human nature of ancient times had been corrupted by civilization. But, current humans--"savages" still living "close to nature"--that is, contemporary hunter--gatherers and "simple farmers," could serve as analogues, or proxy data, for how Europeans had lived in the distant past (Lafitau [1724] 1974). In short, "As they are now, so our ancestors once were." This concept offered the possibility of learning about "original" human nature and of "placing" various peoples and ethnic groups along some sort of scale of sociocultural development. (Fowler and Fowler 1991: 40-41). A key assumption was that of psychic unity: all human minds are basically the same but differ in their degree of "enlightenment" (McGrane 1989; Manuel 1959; Pagden 1982, 1993).

A principal concern of Americanist scholars continued to be the issue of origins. This question, asked since the time of Columbus, had yielded no clear answers, hence the "origins controversy" remained a major anthropological and historical issue for nearly three hundred years. To the inductive, naturalistic--oriented scholars of the late eighteenth century, the problem was one of "hard" evidence. Comparative studies of languages seemed to provide an answer. The idea of language families, and of mother languages with descendant daughter languages, had long been recognized; e.g., Latin and its Romance-language descendants. The discovery of Sanskrit as Indo-European lent further credence to the concept (Mukherjee 1968).

By the 1770s, scholars in Europe were busily collecting word lists and comparing them for cognate words in attempts to arrive at "genetic" classifications of world languages (Adelung and Vater 1806-7; Bonfante 1954; Fowler 1975). Such connections might provide "hard" evidence for migrations, both within the Old World and from the Old into the New. The method was taken up by North American scholars in the 1780s, including Benjamin Smith Barton (1797) and Thomas Jefferson. They began to collect linguistic materials toward a systematic classification of Indian languages, with the hope of linking one or more languages, or language families, to those in the Old World.

A related issue was archaeological. Who had built the burial mounds and enormous earthen structures in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, and the smaller ones scattered east of the Appalachians? How did those complex works relate to the issue of origins of the Indians? Did the ancestors of the current Indians build the mounds, or had some other people(s) done so?

The Jefferson/APS Research Agenda

Thomas Jefferson was deeply interested intellectually in the origins issue, both in its linguistic and archaeological aspects, and also in what would now be called applied anthropology. Steeped in Cicero and English traditions of natural law, and as the author of the Declaration of Independence and the governor of Virginia in the latter years of the Revolutionary War, Jefferson well understood the new challenges for government that American independence would bring. Actively seeking the westward expansion of the nascent United States, he envisioned a glorious new "empire of liberty." He also realized that its democratic governance required the collection of both demographic and ethnographic information about the various Indian tribes for diplomatic and management purposes (Wallace 1999: 75-275).

Jefferson ([1784] 1944: 220-27) discussed linguistic and archaeological matters relating to Indians in his "Notes on Virginia," calling for a systematic linguistic classification as the basis for approaching the origins issue, and for organizing historical and ethnographic information about the Indians. He also called for a program to study the mounds. Jefferson personally took up linguistic research. He developed a printed vocabulary list of "common appellations" and circulated it to collect comparable data for a genetic classification of Indian languages (Fowler 1975: 18-22).

Jefferson and other members of the American Philosophical Society (APS) "under the intellectual spell of the Enlightenment" were, to use Irving Hallowell's (1967: 12) felicitous phrase, "anthropologists without portfolios." In 1799 they developed and distributed their "Circular Letter" (Jefferson et al. 1799) which, together with Jefferson's discussions in his "Notes on Virginia," are regarded as the charters of American anthropology (Chinard 1943b: 270; Hallowell 1960: 16-18; Wissler 1942: 189). The circular called for systematic compilation of linguistic, ethnographic, historical, and archaeological data relating to the Indians:

 
   To obtain accurate plans, drawings and descriptions ... of ancient 
   Fortifications, Tumuli, and other Indian works of art; ascertaining the 
   materials composing them, their contents, and the purposes for which they 
   were probably designed &c.... To inquire into the Customs, Manners, 
   Languages and Character of the Indian nations, ancient and modern, and 
   their migrations. (Jefferson et al. 1799:xxxvii) 

Pursuit of archaeological questions was further facilitated by the establishment in 1812 of the American Antiquarian Society, which soon began to publish major and minor papers on the mounds, many of which addressed the origins issue (Atwater 1820; Thomas 1820).

In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Jefferson, Albert Gallatin, Stephen Du Ponceau, John Pickering (1820), and numerous others doggedly collected linguistic data. In 1817, Du Ponceau became secretary of an APS committee devoted to the task, and he became a highly skilled student of Indian languages. (3) The pursuit lasted more than three decades before Gallatin (1836) produced his famous synopsis of Indian languages. This was only a partial classification, however, since few data were available from tribes in and beyond the Rocky Mountains--or in the Southwest. Gallatin's (1848b) later analysis of linguistic data collected by Horatio Hale (1846) during the 1838-42 Wilkes Expedition added to the store of knowledge, but a full linguistic classification of all North American tribes remained unrealized.

Study of the mounds proceeded during the same period. Caleb Atwater (1820) produced one of the first major reports, compiling maps and much related data on mounds in the Mississippi drainage. His work was followed in the 1830s and 1840s by that of Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis. Their Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (Squier and Davis 1848), the first publication of the nascent Smithsonian Institution, was a major step toward recording and understanding the archaeology of the mounds (Meltzer 1998). The issue of who built the mounds remained unresolved, however.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND WESTERN EXPLORATION

Even before the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory, Jefferson had planned an expedition to "stake a claim" there before the British could do so (Kennedy 1999: 44-55). With the territory in hand and the dispatching of Lewis and Clark to explore it, Jefferson saw an opportunity to collect a wide range of information about the geography, topography, natural history, and the Indians there. He had begun with the whole "empire of liberty" in view and systematically considered how to classify its parts and understand the relationship of the parts to the whole. Many data were needed for both scientific and management purposes. Jefferson and his APS colleagues drew up detailed lists of questions for Lewis and Clark to guide their observations as they made their journey. The explorers produced a remarkable amount of information in their journals (Biddle 1814; Thwaites 1904-5) and in their reports to Jefferson in answer to the questions. (4)

The APS savants were following a precedent of seventy years. Expeditions sent by Peter the Great to Siberia and the North Pacific, e.g., the Kamchatka expedition of 1733-43 and others later in the century, carried inquiries developed by Gerhard Mtiller (1761) and later by the Academy of Sciences of Russia (1926: 162-67). The Royal Society of Britain provided inquiries for Joseph Banks's exploration of Newfoundland and Labrador in 1766 (Lysaght 1971: 218-21) and presumably for James Cook's first voyage to the South Seas in 1768-1771, although we have not discovered printed instructions for the latter.

Providing detailed lists of questions set a precedent for all subsequent federally sponsored parties of exploration to the West. In 1818, Du Ponceau's APS committee (Du Ponceau et al. 1819) drew up extensive instructions for Lt. Stephen Long's explorations to the Rocky Mountains. Long also employed naturalists and artists to help collect information, thus setting a second precedent for future exploration (Dillon 1967; Long 1823). Long was a member of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, the elite officer-engineer-scientist group established within the U.S. Army in 1812 and given much independence of action after 1838. Until the Civil War, when it was merged back into the Army Corps of Engineers, the Corps of Topographical Engineers was the major governmental unit involved in exploring, mapping, and studying the West. Collecting geographic, natural history, and anthropological information and specimens became a routine task of the parties of exploration (Goetzmann 1959, 1966: 231-352). The Wilkes naval expedition to the Pacific in 183842 (Tyler 1988) was also guided by lists of questions drawn up by an APS committee (Conklin 1940).

A Synonymy/Encyclopedia

Another individual who saw the need to collect anthropological data for both scholarly and management purposes was Lewis Cass. Appointed governor of the Northwest Territory in 1818, with responsibility for administration of Indian affairs, Cass soon set about collecting anthropological data. His Inquiries Respecting the History, Traditions, Languages, Manners, Customs, Religions, etc., of the Indians, published in 1823, is a detailed ethnographic and linguistic manual reflecting his extensive knowledge of Indian cultures and languages.

It was Cass who added an important item to the American anthropological research agenda. In a long 1826 article in the North American Review, he noted that most Indian tribes were known by a wide variety of names. A synonymy of tribal names was required, he thought, if ever a linguistic classification were to be properly developed or a comprehensive history of the tribes written. The problem was that many tribes, including those already extinct, were known by numerous names, opening the possibility for major errors on the part of unwary scholars. The idea of a synonymy was expanded into the idea of an encyclopedia by Cass's protege, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. In 1847 Schoolcraft convinced Congress to appropriate $1,200 to begin the compilation of a "digest" of statistics and "other materials" relating to North American Indians. He developed both a census questionnaire and an ethnographic inquiry (Schoolcraft 1847) based on Cass's model, and sent them to Indian agents, traders, Army officers, and missionaries. Ten years and nearly $130,000 later, Schoolcraft (1851-57) completed the pell-mell compilation of answers he had received into six massive, and largely unusable, volumes. (5) The need for a useful synonymy and encyclopedia of Indians remained.

ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE SOUTHWEST

Prior to 1821, scholars in the United States had little firsthand information about the Southwest. The founding of the nation of Mexico in 1821 and the opening of the Santa Fe Trail began to change that (Fowler 2000: 31-37). Scholars were aware that the Southwest had long figured in one part of the origins controversy. British historian William Robertson knew about Mexican codices, and had copies made in Seville and Madrid of Spanish documents relating to histories of the Aztecs and other indigenous groups for use in the 1777 and later editions of his History of America (Robertson 1840, IV: 715-16, 800-51). But the major source was Clavigero's History of Mexico, published in English in London in 1787 and soon thereafter in the new United States. Francisco Javier Clavigero (1731-1787), a Mexican creole who entered the Jesuit order in 1748, was the most influential Mexican historian of the eighteenth century. He studied Mexican history and the Nahuatl language, producing a detailed grammar of the latter (Anderson 1973). His History was first published in Italian in 1780-81, after the expulsion of the Jesuits from New Spain. (6)

In History of Mexico, Clavigero presents a description of Mexican geography, a chronicle of pre-Aztec peoples in central Mexico, and detailed descriptions of Aztec society and culture and the conquest. The main body of the work is a history of highland Mexican societies, especially the Toltecs and their successors. Clavigero reviews in detail the various theories of the origins of the American Indians and the animals found in the New World. He derives the Toltecs and their successors in Anahuac from Asia:

 
   Those countries in which the ancestors of those nations established 
   themselves, being situated towards that part where the most westerly coast 
   of America approaches to the most easterly part of Asia, it is probable 
   that they passed from the one to the other continent; either in vessels, if 
   the strait of the sea then divided them which is there at present, 
   according to the discoveries of the Russians [Vitus Bering's discovery in 
   1741 of the strait named for him], or by land, if the continents were 
   united. (Clavigero [1787] 1979, I: 213) 

He derives the Indians of eastern North America from northern Europe and those in South America from Africa by way of a now-submerged connection between Africa and Brazil (Clavigero [1787] 1979, I: 214-21).

Clavigero (vol. 2:85-115) then outlines the migratory and political histories of the Toltecs and their successors in Anahuac. The Toltecs came from the original kingdom of Tollan, vaguely located "to the north-west of Mexico." They set out to the south in A.D. 596, stopping for unspecified periods in unspecified locales. After 104 years of intermittent wandering, they arrived east of the Valley of Mexico and founded Tollantzinco, shifting twenty years later to the west and founding "the city of Tollan or Tula, after the name of their native country." The Toltecs flourished until A.D. 1052 when, decimated by famine and disease, they dispersed to Yucatan, Guatemala, or other highland cities, such as Cholula. After a century, the Toltecs were succeeded by the "Chechemecas," barbarian hunters who also "were originally from the northern countries, as we may call the North of America." These Chechemecas ultimately were integrated into various city-states in the highlands (vol. 2: 85-90).

Finally, from the north, from the "province of Aztlan" came the "Nahuatlacas, ... seven tribes of the same nation, who arrived in that country after the Chechemecas, and peopled the little islands, banks and boundaries of the Mexican lakes" (vol. 2: 107). These various Nahua-speaking tribes began moving southward in the 1100s. The last tribe to move was the "Aztecas or Mexicans." About A.D. 1160, the Aztecas left

 
   Aztlan, a country situated to the north of the gulf of California.... 
   Having passed ... the Red [Colorado] River from beyond the latitude of 
   thirty-five [degrees north], they proceeded towards the southeast, as far 
   as the fiver Gila, where they stopped for some time; for at present there 
   are still remains to be seen of the great edifices built by them in the 
   borders of that river. From thence having resumed their course toward the 
   south-southeast, they stopped in about twenty-nine degrees of latitude, at 
   a place which is more than two hundred and fifty miles distant from the 
   city of Chihuahua, towards the north-northwest. This place is known by the 
   name of Casa grandi [sic, Casas Grandes, or Paquime], on account of an 
   immense edifice still existing, which, agreeable to the universal tradition 
   of these people, was built by the Mexicans in their peregrination. 
   (Clavigero 2: 112, 114-15). 

From Casas Grandes, the Aztecs proceeded southward to their destiny in the Valley of Mexico.

During his great five-year expedition to Spanish America, Alexander von Humboldt studied manuscript histories in Mexico City, and later sources in the Vatican Library in Rome. (7) In two of his many books on the New World, Humboldt ([1811] 1972, [1810] 1814) laid out a detailed "history" of preconquest Mexico based primarily on Clavigero's work, although he did not always agree with the latter. In his 1811 Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, Humboldt wrote:

 
   From the regions situated to the north of the Gila River issued forth those 
   warlike nations who successively inundated the country of Anfihuac. We are 
   ignorant whether that was their primitive country or whether they came 
   originally from Asia or the northwest coast of America.... The people who 
   traversed Mexico left behind them traces of cultivation and civilization. 
   The Toltecs appeared first in 648, the Chichimecs in 1170, the Nahua in 
   1178 and the Aztecs in 1196. (Humboldt [1811] 1972: 46) 

Thus Clavigero, either directly or through Humboldt, was the principal source for the idea that the origins of the major peoples and cultures of Mesoamerica lay at some greater or lesser distance north of the Valley of Mexico and that some or all of the Southwestern ruins were "stopping places" for Aztecs and/or Toltecs during their southward migrations. Humboldt was the major source for the idea that the North American mound builders may have been Toltecs, at least in part: "a few Tolteck tribes appear to have mixed with the nations who formerly inhabited the country lying between the eastern bank of the Mississippi and the Atlantic, possibly even the Iroquois (Humboldt [1810] 1814, I: 172). Some authors, for example Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon (see Brodie 1966: 34-50), and Schoolcraft (1851-57) in his history, thought that migrations had occurred from Mexico into the present-day United States.

Here, then, was grist for the speculation mill on New World culture history throughout the nineteenth century, a derivative controversy within the more general origins debate: How far to the north did the Aztec and Toltec migrations originate? All the way from Asia? From the Southwest? From the shores of the Great Salt Lake? Elsewhere? Were the mounds of the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys related to those migrations, indicating points of origin or stopping places? Were there south-to-north migrations? Finally, what hard evidence might be adduced to resolve these questions?

The American Ethnological Society

Albert Gallatin settled in New York City in 1840 after a long and illustrious career of public service as a banker, Pennsylvania legislator, congressman, secretary of the treasury to both Jefferson and Madison, American minister plenipotentiary at the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812, and minister to both France and Great Britain (Adams 1879; Walters 1957). While minister to France, Gallatin was part of Humboldt's intellectual circle, and his "Synopsis of the Indian Tribes of North America" was written at Humboldt's request (Botting 1982; Walters 1957). In New York he became doyen of a group interested in American Indians and archaeology, as well as world ethnology. Members of the group often met informally at Bartlett and Welford's Bookstore in the Astor House, which specialized in foreign books and travel literature. The group included Gallatin; Henry Rowe Schoolcraft; E. G. Squier; John Russell Bartlett (co-owner of the store); John Lloyd Stephens, already famous for his travel books on the Middle East and Middle America; artists such as John Mix Stanley; and literary figures including Edgar Alan Poe (Wallace 1959:21).

Taking their cue from the French and British, Gallatin and his colleagues founded the American Ethnological Society in 1842, thus providing a specialized organizational focus for anthropology, at that time referred to as ethnology, worldwide in scope but still centered on American Indian studies. A publication series was begun. The breadth of the group's interest may be gauged by Bartlett's (1848) "Progress of Ethnology and Geography" paper in the series, which reviews the current state of ethnological knowledge worldwide.

In a March 17, 1846, letter to Secretary of War W. C. Marcy, Gallatin notes that "the modern appellation `Ethnological' has been substituted for that of `Antiquarian.' Its seat is at New York; that of the American Antiquarian Society is at Worcester, Massachusetts; the object of both is the same" (Adams [1879] 1960, II: 625). The Ethnological Society kept its focus on Indians until it went moribund soon after Gallatin's death in 1849. Elsewhere in the United States, as well as in Britain and France, ethnology came to center on issues of slavery and the intertwined question of the "place of the Negro" in nature and the larger scheme of things. As European powers entered simultaneously into a period of nationalist rationalization and further colonialist expansion after 1840, the old issue of commensurability took on new ethnological dimensions in Europe and European colonies. The concomitant rise of positivism led to numerous new ethnological research agendas with a pseudo-scientific spin to them (Gould 1981; Greene 1959).

By the 1840s in the United States there was a rekindled interest in Spanish America, fanned in part by the continuing geopolitical maneuvering to force a war with Mexico (Schroeder 1973). William Hickling Prescott published his great biographical study of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1837, and went on to his equally famous Conquest of Mexico, published in 1843. In the latter, Prescott had originally planned a major chapter on preconquest Mexico, but relegated his data and some speculations to an appendix. He had drawn on numerous unpublished manuscripts copied for him in Mexico and Spain, as well as on Humboldt, Clavigero, Lord Kingsborough's compilation of Mexican codices, and published and manuscript sources provided to him by the French bibliophile and scholar Henri Ternaux-Compans (Ternaux-Compans 1837-41; Wagner 1954: 289-93).

Gallatin, too, became interested in Mexico. Drawing on many sources, including Ternaux-Compans, and others provided by Prescott, Gallatin produced a lengthy paper, "Note on the Semi-Civilized Nations of Mexico' (1845). We will return to Gallatin's work after we review the surveys made in the Southwest by members of the Corps of Topographical Engineers.

Topographical Engineers in the Southwest

For our purposes, two major events took place in 1846. First, the Smithsonian Institution was founded in Washington, D.C. Second, the United States invaded the provinces of New Mexico and Alta California, administrative divisions of the sovereign nation of Mexico. Accompanying the invading Army of the West were four topographical engineers. The reports of two of them, Lt. James Abert and Lt. William H. Emory, were published by the U.S. Congress in 1848 and provided those in the East with accurate firsthand information about the geography, topography, natural history, Indian peoples, and ruins in New Mexico (including present-day Arizona). (8)

As the U.S. Army expanded its explorations in the Southwest and began the long process of dealing with the "wild tribes," notably the Navajo and Apache, data continued to accumulate. In 1849, Lt. James Simpson and two Philadelphia artists, Edward and Richard Kern, accompanied an expedition to Canyon de Chelly, by way of Chaco Canyon. Simpson's 1850 report containing the Kerns's drawings (see Weber 1985) of the great houses in Chaco Canyon, as well as their descriptions and depictions of Jemez and Zuni Pueblos and Inscription Rock, were revelations to Anglo ethnologists and citizens alike. Further ethnographic and archaeological data were provided by Sitgreaves's (1853) report of a wagon road exploration in 1851.

In 1853, Congress instructed the Corps of Topographical Engineers to conduct a series of east-west surveys along several parallels of latitude to ascertain the optimal route for a transcontinental railroad. Lt. A. W. Whipple (1856, 1941) was in charge of the survey through the Southwest in 1853-54. Whipple's "topographer and Smithsonian naturalist" was Heinrich Balduin Mollhausen, a protege of Alexander von Humboldt. In 1857, Mollhausen also accompanied Lt. Joseph C. Ives on the famed steamboat expedition up the Colorado River, thence overland to the Hopi Mesas, and back to Santa Fe. Mollhausen's diary of his first trip was published in both German and English in 1858, providing additional ethnographic and archaeological information and vivid illustrations to readers in both Europe and the United States (Huseman 1995). Whipple's report contained a considerable amount of anthropological information on the Southwest (Whipple, Ewbank, and Turner 1856).

In 1852, John Russell Bartlett was appointed U.S. Boundary Commissioner to help draw the line between the United States and Mexico. His interests were very much ethnological, but his level of political naivete was also very high. His term as boundary commissioner was fraught with murder, mishaps, and partisan politics--especially when he "gave away" to …

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: The Beginnings of Anthropological Archaeology in the North American Southwest: From Thomas Jefferson to the Pecos Conference. Contributors: Wilcox, David R. - Author, Fowler, Don D. - Author. Journal title: Journal of the Southwest. Volume: 44. Issue: 2 Publication date: Summer 2002. Page number: 121+. © 1999 University of Arizona. COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group.

This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.