Hopi Buttes from Homol’ovi Ruins State Park
One noteworthy trend in recent years has been for publishers and scholarly organizations to increasingly put back issues (and in some cases even new issues) of their journals and other publications online for free. This has opened up a huge opportunity for the interested public to easily access publications that until recently have been difficult to find, in some cases even for specialists. Academics have long had access to a wide variety of publications through university libraries, of course, so this is probably less of a noticeable change for them, but it’s huge for those of us without an academic affiliation.
From time to time I’ve noted here when resources like this have become available for publications of interest in the study of Chaco Canyon and Southwestern archaeology more broadly, and today I noticed another one. The Peabody Museum at Harvard (not to be confused with the totally separate Peabody Museum at Yale) has begun to put online many of its early publications, especially those in its Papers series which includes many classic early works in Southwestern archaeology and ethnography.
Perhaps the best known of these publications are those documenting the early-twentieth-century expeditions of Alfred Kidder and Samuel Guernsey in northeastern Arizona, which excavated many rockshelters with astonishingly good preservation of organic artifacts especially from the Basketmaker period early in the Southwestern prehistoric sequence. Those papers are all among the ones now available online, along with some but not all of the papers from the later Awatovi Expedition that documented a much later period in the Hopi area. There are also papers on the archaeology of the Maya region and various other parts of North and South America, as well as many ethnographic papers including several important studies of modern Navajo culture.
Sadly, not all of the early Papers are included, although some are listed as “Coming Soon.” The order in which they seem to be added is odd, and there are some glaring gaps in the sequence. Most noticeable to me is the lack of Volume 21, J. O. Brew’s classic 1946 report on the excavation of the important southeastern Utah site of Alkali Ridge, but there a couple other unexplained gaps as well. (In addition, and less oddly, the more recent numbers in the series that are still in print are not included.)
Like I said above, I only discovered this resource today so I haven’t had a chance to really dig through any of these publications (so to speak). I’ve seen them before in libraries, but it’s something entirely different to have them in electronic form for download. I suspect they’ll be of interest to many readers of this blog as well.
Gambler's House 