back… in pursuit of elusive sites in the Central American jungles were epic at a time when that sort of thing was not being done” (Stone 1972, vii). By successfully functioning in the field, Stone was able to prove herself to her former teacher and other academic archaeologists.

Her connections with the banana company and her sustained presence in Honduras resulted in her hearing of newly uncovered ruins at Travesía, a major center on the Ulua River. She excavated there in 1936, and in 1937, she enlisted Gerhardt Kramer of Tulane to undertake a second season of excavations. Most of the collections resulting from this stage of her research were donated to MARI, but in a letter to Tozzer in 1937, Stone reported that MARI did not have the financial resources to publish her Travesía paper and asked whether the Peabody might be interested in it. In the same year she thanked Tozzer for his frank critique of another paper she had decided not to publish in Maya Research. With these letters, the earliest correspondence preserved in the Peabody Museum between Tozzer and Stone, began the gradual process of Stone’s re-affiliation with Harvard. From 1941 to 1953, she served as a trustee of Radcliffe College, and in 1954, the Peabody Museum appointed her a research associate.

Tozzer initially discouraged Stone about the prospects of publishing her Travesía study with the Peabody, establishing as a requirement that she take Strong’s work into account. Stone complied with this request, welcoming the suggestions of both Strong and Samuel K. Lothrop for improvements in her manuscript. By 1939, with both expressing their appreciation for her work, even though they differed with her conclusions, Tozzer approved the study’s publication by the Peabody. At about the same time, Stone was invited to contribute to The Maya and Their Neighbors, a Festschrift presented to Tozzer in 1940. She published some of her work on Travesía there as well as in her monograph Archaeology of the North Coast of Honduras, brought out by the Peabody Museum in 1941. Parallel with these developments, Stone donated her research materials from Honduras and from Costa Rica, where she began working in 1939, to the Peabody. As early as 1941, Stone had requested and received notes from Peabody-sponsored work in Honduras by Lothrop in 1917. She proposed a Peabody expedition in Comayagua, which resulted in excavations at Yarumela by Joel Canby, who completed his doctoral thesis in 1949. This region was the focus of Stone’s The Archaeology of Southern and Central Honduras published by the museum in 1957.

Stone combined her firsthand knowledge of the archaeology of Honduras and Costa Rica to form the backbone of Pre-Columbian Man Finds Central America, which was published in 1972. This book highlighted the degree and nature of Mesoamerican contact as a crucial issue for the archaeology of these countries. The book benefited from a full adoption of stratigraphic succession, creatively combined with Stone’s own interest in identifying the linguistic identity of archaeological cultures, and its success encouraged the Peabody Museum to publish Pre-Columbian Man in Costa Rica in 1977, the first English-language synthesis of Costa Rican archaeology. Stone’s later publications emphasize broad synthetic themes that serve to place her fieldwork results in context with the continuing work of a new generation. An edited collection on cultivated plants (Stone, ed. 1984) resulted from a symposium at the International Congress of Americanists, and a co-edited volume on the archaeology of lower Central America stemmed from a seminar at the School of American Research (Stone and Lange 1984).

Stone’s life has been the subject of preliminary research by Mary Ann Levine (1994), who notes that Stone’s career epitomizes one alternative strategy for survival of women during the institutionalization of archaeology in the first half of the twentieth century. Obtaining training at what Levine calls “prestigious institutions in the East” paved the way for women like Doris Stone to become unpaid research associates working independently under the sponsorship of equally prestigious universities and museums. By virtue of her freedom from the need for economic support, Stone was able to pursue her archaeological concerns according to her own formulation of basic problems, and she proved herself to her male teachers and colleagues by her mastery of her chosen field. Although