Tower Kiva at Kin Ya’a
This news is a few weeks old and I’ve gone back and forth on whether to say something about it, but I ended up deciding I should. Bob Powers, an important but low-key Southwestern archaeologist who worked on the Chaco Project and is probably best known for leading the Outlier Survey, died on January 2 at his home in Santa Fe. Bob and his wife Willow have been close friends of my family for a long time (they were the family friends who accompanied us on my first visit to Chaco Canyon in 2003), and when I was visiting my mom in Albuquerque back in December we took a day to go up to Santa Fe to see them. Given how little time Bob turned out to have left, I’m very glad we did.
Unlike most of his Chaco Project colleagues, Bob stayed on with the National Park Service for the rest of his career. Much of his later work was in other parks such as Bandelier and Pecos, but Chaco always had a special place in his heart. Being in government rather than academia meant that he wasn’t as active as some other Chaco Project alums in publishing and participating in ongoing debates over the nature of Chaco and Southwestern prehistory in general, but he was nevertheless a key member of that group that revolutionized our understanding of these topics. He will be missed.
Gambler's House 