Alfred Vincent Kidder (October 29, 1885 – June 11, 1963) was an American archaeologist considered the foremost of the southwestern United States and Mesoamerica during the first half of the 20th century. He saw a disciplined system of archaeological techniques as a means to extend the principles of anthropology into the prehistoric past and so was the originator of the first comprehensive, systematic approach to North American archaeology.
Early life
Born in Marquette, Michigan, Kidder was the son of a mining engineer. He entered Harvard College with the intention of qualifying for medical school, but found himself uninspired by premedical courses. He applied for a summer job in archaeology with the University of Utah in 1907. Kidder spent two successive summers in the mesa and canyon country of southwestern Colorado, southeastern Utah and areas of New Mexico. Kidder and Jesse L. Nusbaum (later Superintendent of Mesa Verde National Park), came to the Mesa Verde area with ethnologist Jesse Walter Fewkes to conduct an archaeological survey and to photograph ruins. He obtained his bachelor's degree at Harvard in 1908 and a doctorate in anthropology in 1914.
Archaeological career
Kidder then embarked on a series of expeditions to the Southwest, many in northeastern Arizona. These expeditions were sponsored by Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the associated Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.
From 1915 to 1929, Kidder conducted site excavations at an abandoned pueblo near Pecos, New Mexico, now the Pecos National Historical Park. He excavated levels of human occupation at the pueblo going back more than 2000 years, and gathered a detailed record of cultural artifacts, including a large collection of pottery fragments and human remains. From these items, he was able to establish a continuous record of pottery styles from 2000 years ago to the mid-to-late 19th century. Kidder then analyzed trends and changes in pottery styles in association with changes in the Pecos people's culture and established a basic chronology for the Southwest. With Samuel J. Guernsey, he established the validity of a chronological approach to cultural periods. Kidder asserted that deductions about the development of human culture could be obtained through a systematic examination of stratigraphy and chronology in archaeological sites. This research laid the foundation for modern archaeological field methods, shifting the emphasis from a "gentlemanly adventure" adding items such as whole pots and cliff dwellings to museum coffers to the study of potsherds and other artifacts in relation to the cultural history. Pioneering archaeologists in other regions of the United States completed the transformation of professional methodology initiated by Kidder.
His Introduction to the Study of Southwestern Archaeology, published in 1924, was the first synthesis of North American prehistory based on professionally recovered empirical data. In spite of his efforts at documentation, Kidder's conclusions have sometimes been criticized for a lack of integration between his field reports and his later synthesis and interpretation of that data. However, Kidder clearly emphasized archaeology's need for a scientific "eye" in the development of fact collecting techniques and clear definitions.
In the late 1920s, Kidder started the Pecos Conferences for archaeologists and ethnologists working in the American southwest. In 1927, a temporal system of nomenclature, known as the Pecos Classification System, was established for use in southwestern sites. Archaeologists have since used the sequence, with later variations, to assign approximate dates to dozens of sites throughout the Southwest and to determine cultural ties and differences among them. The same year he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1934. In 1936, Kidder was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1936. That same year, he formally used the Navajo term "Anasazi" to define a specific cultural group of people living in the southwest between approximately 200 BC and 1300 AD. This term had been casually used by excavators for many of the "ancient people" since the early explorations of Richard Wetherill, and had been informally used in the work of the Pecos Conferences.