Speaking of George Pepper

Room 55, Pueblo Bonito

The excavations of Pueblo Bonito by the Hyde Exploring Expedition in the 1890s are most commonly associated with Richard Wetherill, but they were officially led by George Pepper, a student and protégé of Frederic Ward Putnam, the pioneering anthropologist at Harvard whom the Hyde brothers initially tried to get to supervise the excavations personally.  Since Putnam was too busy with his other responsibilities he sent Pepper instead, and it was Pepper who ultimately published several articles on the various findings of the expedition (two of which I have republished on this site) and, eventually, a fairly complete site report taken directly from his field notes.  Pepper was twenty-three years old when he first came to Chaco, which is the same age I was when I started working there myself, and I’ve long felt a connection to him.  As an archaeologist, of course, his activities and attitudes were quite different from mine, but I do think his interpretations of the expedition’s findings were interesting and generally underrated.  He also gave a lot of public talks on the Southwest, which is another role I can strongly identify with.  Since his death, however, Pepper has been a rather obscure figure, and he hasn’t gotten nearly the attention I think he deserves.

Pepper was from Tottenville on Staten Island, which was not yet part of New York City when he was growing up, and I see a Staten Island local news item (via Southwestern Archaeology Today) reporting on a new exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art on Pepper’s anthropological work in the Southwest, which went well beyond the excavations at Chaco.  After Pepper’s death his widow donated his papers to the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University, which is why this exhibition is in New Orleans even though Pepper spent pretty much all of his life in the New York area.  The exhibition only runs through October 24, so I don’t think I’ll be able to get down there to see it, but it sounds like an interesting and long-overdue appreciation of this important figure from the early days of Southwestern archaeology, and I’d say it’s definitely worth a look for anyone who will be in the area.

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