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In 1917, Gamio founded and was the first director of a federal department of anthropology and, despite political upheavals, received sufficient resources to set up several research programs. One of these was the first multidisciplinary anthropological program in the Americas— work on the population of the Teotihuacán Valley. This program lasted five years (1917–1922), involved investigations by over twenty scholars, and combined ethnographic and archaeological studies. The five-volume report that resulted is still an indispensable reference source for central Mexican anthropology and history. Gamio also wrote a doctoral dissertation for Colombia University based on this research.
Other projects initiated by Gamio during the 1920s included investigations into the early sedentary archaic (formative) cultures in the basin of Mexico, the excavation of Copilco and other sites, and supporting a project by Byron Cummings at an early urban center of Cuicuilco. Gamio also founded and edited the journal Ethnos (1920–1925), which published influential reports and essays by Gamio and others concerning the archaeology, ethnology, and contemporary problems of the indigenous peoples of Mexico.
Between 1924 and 1925 Gamio had a brief political career as undersecretary of public education, but after denouncing government corruption in Mexico City newspapers, he had to flee the country. He spent over two years in exile in the United States and guatemala, during which time he began his famous studies of Mexican immigrant laborers in the United States, which became classic in sociology and applied anthropology. After his return to Mexico and for the rest of his life, Gamio was primarily concerned with the direction of several key government and international institutes devoted to improving the living conditions of indigenous groups. He founded and then directed (1942– 1960) the Inter-American Indian Institute, and his work still exercises a profound influence on contemporary Mexican anthropology.
References
For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 1, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 331–333.
Gold cups, jade beads, mummies, temples lost in rainforests—to me, these were the essence of archaeology. Oh, how I longed to become an archaeologist and journey back to the days of our ancient ancestors by following the breadcrumb trails of the artifacts they left behind. In 1954, when I was nine, that was the archaeology I dreamed about as I drifted to sleep beside my dog-eared copy of The Wonderful World of Archaeology (Jessup 1956).
Fourteen years later I found myself in graduate school immersed in the stifling smell of dusky potsherds punctuated every so often by the thunderous explosions of 200–300 broken pieces of pottery being poured out of linen bags onto masonite laboratory tables. These potsherds had become my path to ancient lives. By this time, I had learned enough of archaeology’s arcane secrets that I fully appreciated the stories that could be told by potsherds and other commonplace discards about a society’s rise and fall and its day-to-day existence. I was, in fact, literally excited to be systematically and scientifically analyzing the vast expanse of discards to discover replicated patterns of human behavior that we can still recognize today. At the time, I believed I was about to add my own small piece to understanding the puzzle of the classic Maya collapse (Rathje 1971, 1973). In 1968, that was the archaeology I dreamed about when I dozed off late at night on top of my well-worn copy of Uaxactun, Guatemala: Excavations of 1931–1937 (Smith 1950).
Today, more than three decades years later, I look back on my past dreams of archaeology with a bemused smile on my face, my hands full of fresh garbage, and my mind dancing with thoughts of the calories from fat in our diet or of the recyclables mixed into garbage instead of separated for curbside collection. And instead of
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