American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, which he held until 1987. During his productive career, he directed major fieldwork projects in belize, guatemala, Honduras, mexico, Nicaragua, panama, and peru. Within the united states, he has worked in Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, and Florida.

Willey is perhaps best known for creating the subfield of “settlement pattern” archaeology. For him, the distribution of human settlements provided a natural starting point for the functional interpretation of archaeological cultures. Different sites were best understood, not in isolation, but as part of complex economic, social, and political landscapes. Willey devised his settlement pattern approach under the aegis of the virú valley project, one of the first multidisciplinary research programs in the New World. The widespread popularity of Willey’s approach is due to its workable methodology for addressing questions of social structure, demography, and subsistence patterning.

Willey is the preeminent “grand synthesizer” of American archaeology. From 1953 to 1955, in a series of publications with Philip Phillips, he laid out the baseline for the prehistory of the New World. In 1965, he revised this framework in a comprehensive survey of North and Middle American archaeology. Spanning some 40,000 years of prehistory, his book covers the continent from Alaska to Panama. This project was quickly followed by a second volume on South American archaeology. More than any other work by a professional archaeologist, these lavishly illustrated books served to acquaint a popular audience with the broad diversity of past cultures and their rhythms of horizonal integration and regional florescence.

Willey has maintained a strong interest in the professional development of American archaeology. He prepared his first historical essay in commemoration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the peabody museum of archaeology and ethnology in 1966, and this essay emphasizes the growing professionalization of the field and its increasing claim to scientific status. In 1973, collaborating with Jeremy Sabloff, Willey completed his first major book-length history. This volume differs from Willey’s earlier essay by embracing much of the new archaeology, an explicitly scientific approach grounded in positivism. In the third edition, Willey and Sabloff substantially revised their appraisal of the new archaeology and pointed out some of its excesses.

The influence of Gordon Willey on American archaeology is immense. His work on settlement archaeology is regarded as the starting point for all investigations of culture process and social change, his syntheses of New World prehistory and the history of American archaeology are considered classics and are widely used as textbooks, and his writings on functionalism, culture process, and ideology have anticipated many of the recent trends in archaeology since the 1980s. One of Willey’s most distinguishing characteristics is his balanced view of archaeological explanation, and throughout his career, he has consistently sought to bridge the tensions between humanist and scientific traditions.

Robert Preucel

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 2, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 709–712.

Williamsburg, Colonial

Williamsburg, the eighteenth-century capital of Virginia, earned its place in the annals of archaeology through the pioneering techniques used there to uncover the remains of British colonial buildings and then reconstruct them. In 1928, by excavating and rebuilding the colony’s capitol, architects employed by John D. Rockefeller began to turn Williamsburg into a living museum in an ongoing archaeological, architectural, and curatorial process that has continued into the twenty-first century.

The methods developed by the architects and their draftsmen that exposed foundations but ignored stratigraphy and the potential testimony of artifacts were replaced in 1957 after the arrival of British archaeologists who used methods employed in the Old World by the great stratigraphers sir mortimer wheeler and kathleen kenyon. Emphasis on site cleanliness