A Laboratory for Anthropology: Science and Romanticism in the American Southwest, 1846-1930

This sweeping history tells the story of an idea, “The Southwest,” through the development of American anthropology and archaeology. For eighty years, anthropology more than any other discipline described the people, culture, and land of the American Southwest to cultural tastemakers and consumers on the East Coast. The author uses biographical vignettes to recreate the men and women who pioneered American anthropology and archaeology in the Southwest and explores institutions such as the Smithsonian, University of Pennsylvania Museum, School of American Research, and American Museum of Natural History that influenced southwestern research agenda, published results, and exhibited artifacts. Equally influential were the “Yearners”--novelists, poets, painters, photographers, and others--such as Alice Corbin, Oliver La Farge, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Laura Adams Armer whose literature and art incorporated southwestern ethnography, sought the essence of the Indian and! Hispano world, and substantially shaped the cultural impression of “The Southwest” to the American public.

"This is a really outstanding, important book. Don Fowler, a noted archaeologist, historic preservation specialist, and historian of anthropology, has written a comprehensive account of the anthropological quest to understand Native cultures of the American Southwest prior to World War II. Combining many threads of evidence, Fowler presents brief vignettes that highlight and summarize the intellectual endeavors of the fascinating men and women who have worked in the American Southwest, using it as their laboratory, and who made it the most studied culture in the world. A Laboratory for Anthropology presents a fresh, new approach. I know of no one better than Dr. Fowler to write such a synthesis."—Dr. Nancy J. Parezo, Arizona State Museum