THE SCHOOL OF AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY

EDGAR L. HEWETT

To those who have watched the unfolding of the aims of the ArchaeologicalInstitute of America since its initial meetings in 1879, the following pres­

entation of the work already accomplished by the School of American Arch­aeology cannot fail to give sincere pleasure. The present status of the School,as is shown, has been made possible by help received from the State of NewMexico, the dty of San Diego, California, and contributions given by large­hearted, generous men.

The report opens a vista of the task that lies before the School, which,speaking literally, is no less than unearthing the past history of the continent.It is a task that is fraught with difficulties and for its accomplishment willrequire many years of unremitting labor on the part of scholars who have beentrained in the various branches of anthropological research.

Recalling the work of Lewis H. Morgan, John W. Powell, Frederic W. Putnam,and Daniel G. Brinton, the founders of the study of anthropology in America,leads to the hope that their labors may bear increasing fruit in the future. Toserve that end, an endowment fund for the School of American Archaeologywould assure a stable income, and make possible the permanent assistance ofscholars toward enabling it to do its share in the task of recruiting America'spart in the long history of human achievement.-ALIcE C. FLETCHER, ChairmanEmeritus of the Managing Committee of the School.

THE School of American Archae­ology is completing the first phaseof its plans made nearly ten years

ago-that of securing foundations andequipment and thoroughly testing its

.initial ideals. I t has been mainly a cre­ative work. There were no precedentsto follow, but there were some tradi­tions to overthrow. I ts establishmentwas authorized by the ArchaeologicalInstitute of America in 1907. By ar­rangement with the State of New Mex­ico in 1909 it was located in the historicPalace of the Governors at Santa Fe.

In seeking a permanent situation forthe school it was natural that the mindsof its founders should turn to Santa Fe,situated as it is in the heart of the greatSouthwestern field, the gateway to Cali­fornia and Mexico, and offering excep­tional climatic advantages. Moreover,

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the use of the ancient Palacio Real,ideal in every respect for the seat ofsuch an institution, was tendered to theInstitute, and later a modest subsidyfor maintaining museum and researchwork was offered by the State.

Other attractive locations were urgedand by some favored. Among themwere Denver, Colorado Springs, LosAngeles, and Mexico City. The last isundeniably favorable from purely ar­chaeological considerations, but it wasthe belief of the majority that onlyupon the soil of the United States wouldstability and permanence be assured. Itwas a clear case of coming events cast­ing shadows before. The decision wasin favor of Santa Fe.

Credit for presenting the advantagesof Santa Fe for the location, and con­vincing the legislature of New Mexico

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The new Museum or Art being erected on a site adjacent to the Palace, Santa Fe. The south ra~ade

of the desirability of granting the Palaceand state aid, is due the ArchaeologicalSociety of New Mexico. Small in num­bers at that time, but active and far­seeing, this organization secured thelocation of the school, has grown to anation-wide membership exceeding fourhundred, and out of it has developedthe Santa Fe Society of the Institutewith a membership of seventy-seven.

When transferred to the School, thePalace building was sadly dilapidated,and it was necessary to rescue it fromthe neglect of many years and put it inorder. Its original construction was for­tunately such as to defy all destructiveagencies save the disfigurements in­flicted by successive generations in theway of modern "improvements." Thesewere completely eliminated and theoriginal simple style revealed. Meansfor the restoration of the Palace were

derived in part from state appropria­tions and partly from private sources.

The record of those first steps wouldnot be complete without referring to theassistance given by the women's organi­zations of Santa Fe, which have madethe welfare of the School one of theirfirst interests. These bodies, especiallythe Women's Museum Board, officiallyrepresentative of all women of the city;the Woman's Board of Trade; and theSanta Fe Women's Club, wrought withpurpose and spirit rarely paralleled.Their achievements are a lasting testi­monial to the efficiency of women inpublic work, and not the least of theseis what they have done for this insti­tution.

So, by united efforts of the Institute.of friends of the School at large, of thepeople of Santa Fe and the State ofNew Mexico, the Palace has been put

The east ra~ade or the new Museum or Art

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Tower and Belfry, Indian Arts Building, San Diego, California

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Tht> Cl'ntral Gatt'. Science of Man Building, San Diego, California

in repair, made the headquarters of theSchool and the seat of a museum that is,in many respects, unique.

Recently, through the munificence ofFrank Springer, Esq., and a group of hisfriends, the sum of $3°,000 has beenraised to make available an equalamount voted by the State of NewMexico, and a valuable site adjacentto the Palace of the Governors, donatedby the people of Santa Fe for the con­struction of a new art museum, which,in its style, will perpetuate all that isfine in the early ecclesiastical architec­ture of New Mexico, as the Palace doesfor the civil or governmental. The newbuilding, contents, and site, togetherwith the Palace and its equipment,

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valued at $35°,000, are granted to theSchool of American Archaeology for itsperpetual use. This constitutes the es­tablishment that has been developedin Santa Fe.

The invitation extended to the Schoolin 1911 by the president of the Panama­California Exposition at San Diego toestablish and conduct a department ofarchaeology and ethnology, not for theyear 1915 only, but something "thatwould stand as a permanent contribu­tion to the world's progress," providinga budget of $100,000 for expeditions,acquisition, and installation of mate­rial, and assigning therefor the group offireproof buildings, marked the begin­ning of an important extension of the

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The Prado Gate, San Diego Museum

work of the School. The proposed ar­rangement was entered into and car­ried out on both sides.

As a result the School was able topromote expeditions in many parts ofthe world. Final publication of thescientific work done will require yearsand fill several volumes. The amount ofmaterial obtained was such that an im­portant museum of anthropology, ar­chaeology, and art has been created inone of the most ideal locations in theworld, equipped with excellent build­ings, exhibition halls, cases, labora­tories, libraries, and offices. It has alsoadded a new department to the work ofthe School, the Anthropological Station.

The entire equipment of the Schoolmay be conservatively valued at half amillion dollars, against which there isno indebtedness. To this must be addedthe permanent appropriation of $10,000a year (the income on $250,000 at fourper cent) by the State of New Mexicofor the maintenance of the local estab­lishment. I t is expected that the branchat San Diego will be equally supported.This is the contribution of a few peopledevoted to the advancement of scienceand art in two western communitiesthat are as yet comparatively unde­veloped in population and wealth.

It is gratifying to be able to announcethis during the decennial year of the

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foundation of the School and the or­ganization of the managing committee.During the five years prior to this de­cade, the Institute, for its work inAmerican archaeology, maintained onlya fellowship with an annual stipend of$600, before which nothing was ex­pended in the American field for manyyears. The present organization has inless than ten years established theSchool of American Archaeology as aforceful and growing institution andhas equipped it with buildings, mu­seums, libraries, and laboratories ade­quate for the research work that itshould pursue, at the same time carry­ing on a fair amount of field work andproviding practical training for menand women who are now making im­portant contributions in ethnology,archaeology, and art.

The consummation of these plansenables it to go forward with greatconfidence. It is next necessary to ob­tain a general endowment fund thatwill enable it to maintain fellowships,laboratories, and studios, and supportresearch and publication. This willrequire an income of $50,000 a year.The large amount of museum workthat has developed has given the Schoola great place in scientific education.Through this agency it serves a largeconsti tuency. I ts purpose "to provideopportunities for field work and train­ing to students of archaeology and eth­nology" is steadily maintained. Since1907 it has never been without as manyscientific students engaged in prepara­tion for serious work through its activi­ties as the demands of the field seemedto justify.

Probably nothing is of greater im­portance to the Institute than excava­tion. For many years, so far as theInstitute was concerned, the spade wasout of commission in the home field.

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Now no year passes without substan­tial field work. The excavations andethnological work in Guatemala, theSouthwest, and California, have con­tinued over a considerable term of yearsand will go forward steadily. I t is nowpossible to announce the consummationof an arrangement for a large archaeo­logical en terprise which should be amongthe most fruitful of all those in whichthe Archaeological Institute has had apart.

The Smithsonian Institution, theRoyal Ontario Museum of Toronto.Canada, and the School of AmericanArchaeology, have planned to under­take jointly the systematic and defini­tive study of the ancient ruins of ChacoCanyon, New Mexico, and continue thesame for a number of years, the collec­tions obtained to be divided equallyand deposited for preservation in themuseums of the three cooperating in­stitutions. The work will be under thedirection of a commission consisting ofWilliam H. Holmes, of the UnitedStates National Museum; F. W. Hodge,of the Bureau of American Ethnology;C. T. Currelly, of the Royal OntarioMuseum of Toronto; and Edgar L.Hewett, of the School of AmericanArchaeology. This commission will haveits chairman and disbursing officer, di­rect all expenditures, engage employes,and have full charge of the scientificwork of the expeditions. Preliminarywork necessary to satisfy the require­ments of the Government concessionwill be done during the year 1916, andby the following year the excavationswill be in full operation.

The Chaco Canyon ruins constitutethe most important and best-preservedgroup of prehistoric towns in the UnitedStates. Probably no ancient remains innorthern America afford a field of higherinterest 'to the archaeologist than these

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remarkable ruins that have lain par­tially buried for centuries in the sandsof the Navaho desert. The region em­braces no fewer than twelve towns offirst importance, and numerous smaller,though possibly no less important, out­lying ruin-groups. In places, brokenstone walls still stand to a height offifty feet, with fragments of fifth-storyconstruction still in place.

The collaboration of the Smithson­ian Institution, the Royal OntarioMuseum, and the Institute's School ofAmerican Archaeology in this enter­prise insures a combination of scientificand pecuniary forces commensurate withthe importance of the undertaking. Nodoubt as the work progresses it will befound desirable to increase the expendi­ture now provided for.

Something more may now be said ofSanta Fe, the headquarters of the school,and of San Diego, where large interestshave developed.

La Villa Real de Santa Fe de SanFrancisco (The Royal City of the HolyFaith of St. Francis)! The name alonewould invite the establishment here ofa school of archaeology and art. Itsuggests Spain and Italy, and medirevalfervor. It connotes opportunity to dwellamong things that live, that are too.vital to perish utterly, in spite of time,and war, and pestilence, and progress.I t is the Damascus of the New World.

Of old, long trails converged at SantaFe from across eastern, southern, andwestern wastes, in comparison withwhich those that led to Damascus inSyria were easy journeys. As with itsfar-famed prototype, diverse peoplescame and mingled and made it. It wasall the same to Damascus whether itwas Hebrew or Assyrian or Persian orRoman or Turk-it was Damascus still.So Santa Fe could be Indian or Spanish,or Moorish or Me"ican or American. It

has the blood, the monuments, thespirit of them all, and respects themall. There are portions of it in whichone can forget all the centuries fromthe seventeenth on. Entire barrios existalmost unchanged in physical appear­ance: narrow, crooked streets, adobewalls, acequias, cemeteries, chapels,houses, plaza, and even the PalacioReal (sole building in the United Statesthat can rightly be called a royalpalace), remain in substantial form.

From Fort Marcy acropolis, one looksdown upon three cultures: Indian, Span­ish, American. The first, spanning in­definite centuries; the second and mostconspicuous, three hundred years old,so perfectly adapted as to seem indige­nous; the last here only seventy yearsand looking decidedly nondescript. Onethinks of the Eternal City and of look­ing down from the Capitoline Hill uponthe work of the aborigines, kings, em­perors, popes-the greatest vista of hu­man history that is anywhere possibleto one sweep of the eye. And in truth,there is no reason why the Indians ofthe towns on the site of Santa Fe shouldnot have been living their simple livesin the same days that the aboriginalLatins were basking in the sun of theSeven Hills, baking pottery by pre­cisely the same methods as the Indians,and, in the same way, folding up thebodies of their dead for burial along theVia Sacra.

The Palace was built upon a massivepile of Pueblo ruins. When it was dis­mantled for repair, huge masses of theancient, puddled walls (brick construc­tion was not used by the Indians in pre­Spanish times) were laid bare. Indianartifacts and skeletal remains were foundin excavating for the heating plant backof the Palace at a depth of ten feet, andthe same occurred on the eastern sideof the plaza and north to the bluffs that

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uverlook the city. The excavations forthe basement of the new art museumhave disclosed a definite archaeologicalstratification. That Indian towns cov­ered the hills and valley of Santa Feduring the centuries prior to the com­ing of the Spaniards can no longer bedoubted, for both archaeological andtraditional evidence is conclusive onthis point. I t is equally certain thatthey were deserted at the time of thecolonization in 1598, or else they wouldhave been noted in the records of thatIwriod.

But the Spanish town, La Villa Realde Santa Fe de San Franciso, founded1606, remains. Three-fourths of itshouses are, in style, seventeenth-cen­tury Spanish. Three-fourths of itspeople are distinctly Spanish in type,and in their homes speak as good Cas­tilian as one hears in Andalusia today.The town of three hundred years agoactually survives, while of its contem­poraries, St. Augustine, 1565; James­town, 1607; Plymouth, 1620, barely('nough remain for landmarks. SantaFe has always been a far-flung outpost.Events that shook the seats of govern­ment to which it was successively tribu­tary-:Vladrid, Mexico City, and Wash­ington-were but little felt in its farseclusion. Likewise, the rush of nine­teenth-century civilization which hasleft visible mere vestiges of the be­ginnings of Eastern cities, was so farmoderated by the time it reached SantaFe as to have lost its destructive force.How much of actual early seventeeth­century walls remains, no one could say.More, doubtless, than one would imag­ine at first thought, for adobe is adurable material. Structures of knowndate, three hundred years old, are wellpreserved.

The School group, consisting of thePalace, the new art museum, and the

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building just remodeled to serve as theresidence of the director, presents onegood example of each functional form­civic, ecclesiastic, and domestic, andmay perhaps set a standard of architec­tural fitness for the entire State and bethe means of establishing eventually aregional type. In none of its forms is itidentical with the more modern "Cali­fornia style," though the common Mex­ican ancestry of the two is obvious. Thetwo northern streams carried up from:\'Iexico by the priests and colonizers ofNew Mexico and California early in theseventeenth and late in the eighteenthcentury, respectively, cannot owe theirlocal variations entirely to environment.

There is something racial about it.Santa Fe, in its early domestic archi­tecture, was decidedly Moorish. It wasAndalusian with the strong Moorishcast that was imparted to everythingin southern Spain. Its civic architec­ture had much in common with thelVlexican, but the characteristic portalhad elements which, rudimentary in theancestral type, became elaborated intoa fixed local style. In domestic archi­tecture the portal was an open vesti­bule, flanked by rooms. In civic, it wasextended into an imposing colonnadesometimes terminating in torreones. Theecclesiastic or mission architecture ofNew Mexico was such a distinct devel­opment from the Franciscan of Mexicoas to warrant the permanent name"New Mexico Mission" in distinctionfrom the arcaded "California Mission."

\Vhen the school was established inSanta Fe, its first task was the reclama­tion of EI Palacio and its restoration tothe archaic type. It was first a work ofelimination-taking out the modern ex­crescences, milled casings and mantles,papered walls, cloth ceilings; substitut­ing nothing at all-simply laying barethe ancient vigas, restoring the old nat-

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ural lines of doors, windows, and fire­places.

The earliest plans of the School con­templated the preservation of all an­cient landmarks of the Southwest andespecially a revival of the early Spanisharchitecture. The building of the newart museum is an effort to recover andembody in one imperishable exampleall that was fine in the seventeenth­century missions in New Mexico. Thereis something in it of old Mexico, some­thing of Spain, something of Italy; butmostly it is of the Rio Grande, and thechildren of its soil who for ages havebeen building their habitations andsanctuaries out of the earth from whichthey were born. For, as they under­stood it, it was from the earth-motherthat the first people of New Mexicocame. She cradled them in cave andcliff while waiting on the ages. To themnothing is more sacred than earth andits deific powers. Of no other materialcould their holiest sanctuaries be made.

The missions of New Mexico ante­date those of California by a centuryand a half. The classic examples, allin ruins, are Pecos, Quarai, Tabira, Ab6,and Jemez; the first three now ownedby the School of Archaeology. Othervenerable examples, built only a fewyears later and still preserved in ser­viceable condition, are Acoma, Laguna,San Felipe, Isleta, Santo Domingo,Santa Ana, Nambe, Picuris, and Taos.San Miguel at Santa Fe was spoiledby bad "restoration"; Santa Clara hascrumbled utterly; San Ildefonso andCochiti have suffered a worse fate­that of rebuilding in hideous style.

The charm of the city of San Diegohas become well known. Mr. BertramG. Goodhue, architect of the exposi­tion, has written:

..Judged by all ordinary and extra­ordinary canons of beauty, the regions

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that may, because of their climate, foli­age, color, and form, be held to be theloveliest, are but few in number-theRiviera, the bays of Naples and Sa­lerno, some of the Greek islands, cer­tain mountain valleys in India, theVega of Granada, the parallel one ofShiraz-the list is almost exhaustednow and the New \Vorld is not yetreached. Yet--except for the charmthat comes from works of men softenedby centuries of use, the glamor givenby ages of history, the tender respectalways commanded by things that arevenerable-in southern California maybe found every attraction possessed bythose ci ted-the tenderest of skies, thebluest of seas, mountains of perfect out­line, the richest of subtropical foliage,the soft speech and unfailing courtesyof the half-Spanish, half-Indian peas­antry-even much in the way of legen­dary that has wandered slowly north­ward in the wake of the padres. In themidst of all this beauty lies the city ofSan Diego, the nearest Pacific port inthe United States to the western endof the Panama Canal."

The museum buildings are the Cali­fornia Quadrangle, the Indian Arts, andthe Science of Man, herewith shown.As at Santa Fe, here is a group of build­ings, embodying in their architecturethe history, religion, and art of pastcenturies, dedicated to the conserva­tion of the memorials of man's progressthrough the ages.

The division of the museum whichseems logically indicated by the begin­nings already made and accommoda­tions available are:

I. The Art Gallery in the Fine ArtsBuilding.

2. The Art of Ancien t America inthe California Building.

3. The Indian Museum in the IndianArts Building.

Aboriginal Pottery-making in the Patio of the Palace, School of American Archaeology

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4. Anthropology in the Science ofMan Building.

The first two buildings mentioned,comprised in the California Quadran­gle, are fireproof. The last two are not,but with a modest expenditure for con­crete foundations, steel lining of inte­rior, and metal conduits for electricwires, both buildings can be made rea­sonably safe. With the excellent begin­ning already provided in the way ofboth buildings and collections, a note­worthy museum seems assured to thecity of San Diego. In order that theimportant collections. apparatus, andother equipment may be utilized to thefullest extent, the Managing Commit­tee of the school has authorized, and

the San Diego Museum Board has gen­erously provided, quarters for the An­thropological Station, which is intendedto be a research branch of the School.

The above is an outline of the activi­ties of the School that have developedduring the first ten years of its exis­tence.

The all-important work for the im­mediate future is that of the financialfoundation. It is hoped that in thecampaign now being inaugurated forthis purpose the managing committeeand staff will have the undivided sup­port of the membership of the Insti­tute and the consideration of all whoare interested in the advancement ofscience and art.

Group of Staff and l\tembers of the School of American Archaeology

(Morris, Beauregard, Harrington, Hodge, Hewett, Judd, Miss Woy, Miss Freire-Marreco,Morley, Chapman, Adams, Nusbaum, Goldsmith, Henderson)

School of A meruan ArchaeologySanta Fe, N.M.

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