125th Anniversary of the Confederation of Canada.

Robert L. Schuyler

References

Kidd, Kenneth E. 1948. “The Excavation of a Huron Ossuary.” Bulletin of the Society for American Archaeology no. 1.

———. 1949. The Excavation of Ste. Marie I. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

———. 1951. Canadians of Long Ago: The Story of the Canadian Indian. Toronto, New York: Longmans, Green.

———. 1969. “Historical Site Archaeology in Canada.” National Museum of Canada Anthropological Papers no. 22.

Kidd, Kenneth E., and Martha Ann Kidd. 1970. “A Classification System for Glass Beads for the Use of Field Archaeologists.” Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History, no. 1.

Kidder, Alfred Vincent

(1885–1963)

Kidder grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as a young man befriended many of Harvard’s great scientists, such as geologists raphael pumpelly and Alexander Agassiz and anthropologists lewis henry morgan and frederic ward putnam from the peabody museum, through his family connections. Kidder began studying medicine at Harvard in 1904, but changed to archaeology after participating in edgar lee hewett’s field school and meeting Alfred Marsten Tozzer, professor of archaeology.

In 1909 Kidder entered graduate school at Harvard to begin work on his doctorate in anthropology under the supervision of Egyptologist george reisner, art historian George Chase, and anthropologist Franz Boas. Kidder continued to excavate during the summer, in 1910 in Newfoundland, and in 1912 at historic Pueblo ruins in the Gobernador and Largo canyons in New Mexico. In 1914 Kidder received his Ph.D. on the style and decorative motifs of Pueblo pottery, suggesting that ceramic materials could be used as a gauge of cultural development in the American Southwest, similarly to what was being done by archaeologists at Old World sites in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Kidder is best remembered for his pioneering approach to the study of Pecos Pueblo (1915–1924) in New Mexico, which had been occupied in both prehistoric and historic times. The connection between potsherds and stratigraphic excavation would be the hallmark of Kidder’s work at Pecos Pueblo, conducted on a massive scale. His use of stratigraphy not only introduced this method of relative dating to archaeology but also brought a sense of the spatial distribution of territory under the control of a specific prehistoric culture. Moreover, Kidder established the value of stratigraphy to Americanist archaeology. While waiting to be inducted into the army in 1917 Kidder spent two months living at the First Mesa in Hopi Indian country and traveling around Hopi territory. Using ethnographic data from cultural anthropology and melding it with excavation data into a workable whole, Kidder’s data from this period raised the science of archaeology to a new interpretive level. In 1920 Kidder was able to return to Pecos Pueblo, where he employed a multi-disciplinary approach to resolve its archaeological problems—physical anthropologists, pottery analysts, ethnographers, engineers, and agronomists were some of the members of the team that studied the Pecos Pueblo material—the first long-term and multi-disciplinary project in North American archaeology.

In 1929 Kidder began the second half of his archaeological career by becoming the director of the Carnegie Institute’s Division of Historical Research in Washington, D.C. Kidder now turned his attention for the most part to the maya of Central America, and introduced his “pan-scientific”/multi-disciplinary approach to resolving Mayan archaeological problems. While this approach was never fully realized, it did succeed in collecting data about the Mayan habitat, agricultural base, technology, and living descendants. Kidder and Charles A. Lindbergh worked jointly on the aerial discovery of Mayan sites throughout the Yucatán and in other locations and began to use the airplane as a tool to trace possible trade routes between Mayan cities. Kidder employed longtime friend and colleague sylvanus g. morley to continue his groundbreaking work deciphering Mayan hieroglyphics. Kidder himself excavated the Kaminaljuyu