Paul Sidney Martin (born November 22, 1898 in Chicago – died January 20, 1974) was an American anthropologist and archaeologist. A lifelong associate of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Martin studied pre-Columbian cultures of the Southwestern United States. He excavated more than a hundred archaeological sites, starting with the groundbreaking seven-season expedition to the Montezuma County, Colorado in 1930–1938. His research passed through three distinct stages: field archaeology of the Anasazi Pueblo cultures of Colorado in the 1930s, studies of the Mogollon culture in 1939–1955 and the New Archaeology studies in 1956–1972. Martin collected more than 585 thousand archaeological artifacts although his own methods of handling these relics were at times destructive and unacceptable even by the standards of his time.
Martin was elected President of the Society for American Archaeology and awarded the 1968 Alfred Vincent Kidder Award of the American Anthropological Association. He trained over fifty professional archaeologists and published more than 200 academic and popular papers. Martin's field expeditions redefined the role of museum anthropologists from the search for exhibits to research-driven field studies.
Biography
Martin was the fifth child of Ellsworth C. Martin and Adelaide May Martin (née Sackett). The most recent biographical article by Stephen Nash states his date of birth as November 22, 1898; the site of the Field Museum of Natural History as November 20, 1899. He attended the New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois. He studied history and languages at the University of Chicago from September 1918 to December 1923. Martin attained a modest B- average grade and found his true calling, anthropology, only in the end of his undergraduate studies. He began graduate studies at the Department of Sociology under Fay-Cooper Cole and became Cole's first Ph.D. student (he defended his Ph.D. thesis on Kiva culture in May 1929). In the summer of 1925 Martin departed for his first practical field excavations sponsored by the Milwaukee Public Museum.
In the summer of 1926 Martin examined 450 sites of the Mount Builders and 1,200 related artifacts in private collections. His first article has set a standard for the rest of his life: Martin the scientist was later known for prompt publication of collected field data. In the next three winters he assisted Sylvanus Morley in his Yucatán expeditions; in summers he attended excavations in Colorado. Martin seriously dedicated himself to Mesoamerican studies, but in 1929 his long-term plans were cut short by an acute bout of tropical diseases. The medics ruled out further field work in the jungle, and Martin had to limit his scientific career to continental United States.
By this time he was already well known to Midwestern historians and archaeologists. In 1928 Martin had already begun his ten-year research in Montezuma County, Colorado but in the summer of 1929 the Department of the Interior denied him permission to excavate Lowry Pueblo. The DOI argued that Martin's employer, the State Historical Society of Colorado, was financially unable to complete the excavation. According to Nash, this setback motivated Martin to seek a stronger employer. Indeed, on August 22, 1929 Berthold Laufer of the Field Museum of Natural History offered Martin a job at the Museum's department of anthropology and Martin readily accepted the offer.
Nash wrote that the Museum "almost certainly" planned to use Martin in the upcoming modernization of the museum exhibits in its new building in Grant Park. Martin "spent a remarkable amount of time" in rearranging the exhibition and public outreach campaigns that preceded and accompanied the Century of Progress exhibition of 1933–1934 and wrote the 122-page guide to the Archaeology of North America collection. After Laufer's suicide in 1934 Martin became the acting curator of the department and temporarily assumed Laufer's role in presenting the Oriental collections to the public. Martin chaired the department if from 1935 to 1964 and remained with the Museum until 1972. According to Nash, "no other Field Museum curator, in anthropology or any other department, was as visible on the exhibition floor, in Field Museum News, or in the Chicago newspapers during" the pre-war period.