1938 Excavations at Tajumulco, Guatemala

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Digging through the Decades: A 90-year Retrospective on American Archaeology; Biennial Gordon Willey Session in the History of Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

It all started modestly enough. A September 1937 drive to New Orleans from Santa Fe and then passage on the United Fruit Company liner Tivives with the ultimate destinations of Quirigua and Guatemala City. This small group of ten with their leader Dr. Edgar L. Hewett travelled as a class sponsored by the School of American Research (SAR). Among the party was graduate student Bertha P. Dutton. Already a field school veteran and a museum professional, Dutton had first worked with Hewett at Chaco Canyon. Hewett and SAR students had only recently begun traveling again to Guatemala after a long hiatus. The 1937 trip yielded a potentially interesting site in Tajumulco, at the foot of a volcano, ignored by previous archaeologists but having already yielded carved stone objects and intriguing mound structures. Dutton returned in 1938 and sent letters from the site, now viewable in the Hewett Digital Archive. Dutton, with two other talented women archaeologists and a local labor force, excavated what became one of the most significant locales for Late Post Classic stone and ceramic works, capturing the transition of a culture under the influence of Mexico and soon to be overwhelmed by Spanish conquest.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Digging through the Decades: A 90-year Retrospective on American Archaeology; Biennial Gordon Willey Session in the History of Archaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51088